Seilevel has a powerful, proven approach for developing complete and easy-to-understand requirements. These simple strategies streamline software and business requirements gathering, and are easily adaptable to your software development processes.
Business Objective Model. The first step is to define the business objectives for the project. Seilevel has created the Business Objective Model to analyze the value of the project, correlating business objectives to measureable financial metrics. The Business Objective Model ensures the project remains focused on the value being offered to the business throughout the entire life of the project. If these objectives are not constantly reviewed and updated, it is easy for the project to miss the target and as a result, all the time and money spent on the project would be wasted.
Features. Features describe the functionality of the system that will ultimately fulfill the business objectives. By splitting up business objectives into different features, Seilevel is able to focus on the features that contribute to the business objectives and add the most value. This approach prevents wasting time and money on unnecessary features. Every requirement will eventually be traced back to a feature, and every feature must be traced directly to a business objective. By keeping only the features that significantly contribute to business objectives, the system can often be built much more cheaply than originally thought.
Visual Models. The core insight of Seilevel’s unique software and business requirements gathering approach is that pictures are more quickly and easily understood by the human mind than words. Seilevel has developed dozens of visual models across four categories – Objectives, People, Systems, and Data. Each of these categories shows a different view of the system, enabling a complete understanding of what requirements are needed. Visual models make it much easier to see if any requirements are being missed. Catching missing requirements before development begins saves costly re-work and the missed deadlines that this re-work entails.
Requirements Traceabilty. The functional requirements and business rules are derived directly from the visual models, and therefore they remain traceable to a specific part of each model. This makes review and validation of the requirements simple: each part of each model generally only results in a few requirements. Rather than walking through a list of hundreds of requirements, the models break requirements into meaningful chunks of the project that are small enough to be easily considered and discussed. When the requirements are finished, each requirement can be traced to the visual model, the feature, and the business objective that provide the full context of why that requirement is necessary and valuable to the project.
Learn more about how Seilevel’s methodology can improve outcomes – contact us at marketing@seilevel.com.
