Requirements form the foundation for all the software work that follows. Arriving at a shared vision of the product to be developed is one of the greatest challenges facing the software project team, and customer involvement is among the most critical factors in software quality. This eLearning seminar describes dozens of tested methods that can help any organization improve the way it elicits, analyzes, documents, validates, and manages its software requirements. The course provides students with a tool kit of “good practices,” reinforced with practice sessions, that they can begin applying to improve the requirements processes in their organization. These techniques can reduce project risk by improving the quality and control of the software requirements, thereby increasing the likelihood of a successfully completed project.

Use cases are an effective and widely used technique for eliciting software requirements. The use-case approach focuses on the goals that users have with a system, rather than emphasizing system functionality. This eLearning seminar presents the use-case approach to requirements elicitation in a practical and straightforward fashion. Many practice sessions give the student opportunities to try some of the techniques described.

This self-paced workshop helps anyone performing the requirements analyst role on a software or systems development project become more proficient at specifying high-quality requirements. It presents extensive advice on how to examine requirements critically for problems and how to write clear, unambiguous requirements of various types. Many practice sessions give students experience in finding requirements problems, distinguishing requirements from design, interpreting customer input, writing precise functional requirements, specifying quality attributes, defining data items and business rules, and choosing alternative ways to represent requirements besides natural language text.

Effective peer reviews of all types of work products are essential if software development organizations are to reduce their cost of producing software. Formal inspections of requirements specifications, designs, source code, project plans, and other work products are a proven means for finding errors and improving the quality of software products. This course shows software practitioners how to effectively apply both inspections and several types of less formal reviews to software products. The Fagan inspection process and roles are described in detail. Besides the mechanical aspects, the interpersonal and social aspects – the soft side – of peer reviews are also addressed. Many tips are provided for establishing a successful peer review program. A practice inspection session will help students learn to conduct effective inspections on their own projects.

Managing software projects is difficult under the best circumstances. You can reduce the difficulty and improve your chances of success by applying known industry best practices for software project management. Best practices are based on industry studies of successful and failed projects, and on the instructor’s personal experience. This eLearning course presents 30 such best practices, grouped into five categories: Laying the foundation for success, Planning the project, Estimating the work, Tracking your progress and Learning for the future. This seminar partially addresses several of the knowledge areas in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), as well as portions of the following process areas in the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI): Project Planning, Project Monitoring and Control, and Risk Management.

Do you need to educate busy managers or your business partners about the key concepts in software requirements engineering and help them understand why solid requirements are fundamental to project success? This eLearning course presents a condensed summary of requirements definitions, major practices for requirements development and management, and ways that emphasizing requirements can actually accelerate software development. The business value of investing in better requirements and better requirements processes is explained. Data shows the benefit of selected requirements practices. Consider facilitating a presentation of this seminar to your senior managers and key user representatives to help them understand why this is such an important topic.