Business Analyst Training is a way of targeting learning for exactly what your employees need. Pierson Requirements Group is a company who will provide business analysis training courses either on or off site to aid you in making your company as effective as possible. In order to take your business’ services to the next level you have to pinpoint your weaknesses and then create training classes and software to strengthen those areas.

Their Joint Application Development (JAD) which is used as a way to bring together the teams your company uses to design technical and creative aspects and the realities of the business world to create a round-table type discussion forum workshop to find out exactly what is needed in your field and make sure that your software is going to cater to those needs. This process saves time and money that is valuable during the upstart of any business.

They aim to cover every area of:

• project management
• business analysis
• system specification
• and more

Trusting a company like Pierson to have your best intrests in mind is the key to a good working relationship, Pierson will answer any questions you or your staff may have before, during, and after your analysis begins. Find out if the methodology used by Pierson is something your company can benefit from by contacting them today.

The problems most companies have with software development are due to poor requirements rather than coding.  Developers know how to code but the business requirements are most often incomplete and don’t effectively communicate the business needs.  The lack of effective requirements gathering and writing leads to 82% of the software re-design and maintenance efforts causing companies to waste millions of dollars a year on ineffective software implementations and lost product to market opportunities.  These statistics are based on studies done by James Martin a leading methodologist.

An important aspect of the iterative development approach is the Joint Application Development (JAD) process.  JAD is used as a technique for developing business system requirements.  The purpose of JAD is to bring together IT and the business community in a structured workshop setting to extract consensus based system requirements.  This is accomplished by using a trained JAD facilitator and customized, planned agendas to assist the participants in arriving at complete, high quality requirements.  Experience has shown that the JAD process substantially reduces development time, costs and errors. 

JAD is typically used in the early stages of a project life cycle. Pierson Requirements Group, Inc provides training and mentoring and shows how a project can be supported through Joint Application Development workshops.

Agile/Iterative development methodology includes JAD techniques for determining user requirements. These requirements are reflected in a set of products that are produced using Object Oriented Analysis and Design.  Pierson provides training for Agile Requirements Gathering & Iteration Planning and JAD Facilitation & Requirements Gathering Training Seminar using Use Cases.  Both these classes provide techniques that can be used by your project teams to achieve consensus-based requirements.

Here are some important statistics to share with your management.  These statistics clearly support the importance of the role of the Requirements Lead/Business Analyst at your organization and why training in the industry standards and best practices is so important.

Pierson’s customers have found that it is a 200:1 cost savings to find defects in requirements rather than in the maintenance phase.  Therefore, it is important to gather and write effective requirements and perform formal inspections and sign-off phases with the business community. 

Studies performed at companies including GTE, IBM and HP have measured and assigned cost to errors occurring at various stages of the lifecycle.  Studies were run independently and all reached the same conclusion.  If at a unit cost of one is assigned to Coding, then the cost to detect and repair an error during the requirements stage is between five and ten times less. The cost to detect and repair an error during the maintenance stage is twenty times more.  As much as a 200:1 cost savings results from finding errors in requirements versus finding errors in the maintenance stage.

Pierson Requirements Group, Inc. provides training in Writing Effective Requirements and User Acceptance Testing.  Click on the links to view the class agendas and learn more about what best practices your project teams need to improve.

Collaborative Requirements Gathering Sessions for Agile Projects

The definition of an application’s business requirements is an iterative process.  The main purpose of the JAD sessions is to capture consensus based business requirements and provide the developers with a good understanding of what the business wants the system to do.  JAD sessions should create documents describing the business activities and system interfaces by utilizing use cases and business models.

JAD Requirements Analysis Session-Activity Steps:

1.   Build the High Level Activity Diagram

2.   Develop the Use Case requirements by identifying the following:

·         Further document the software requirements by identifying the main flows, alternate flows, exception flows, business rules, and design constraints.

·         Prioritize the use cases and requirements lists.  These are later used for the iterative release strategy.

3.   Create the State Diagrams for GUI design and/or a Requirements Storyboard

4.   Site Maps (Storyboards) and screen inventories can also be developed

5.   Identify the business objects and their relationships for each use case. The steps for building the Domain Object Model are as follows:

·         Identify the “real world” objects

·         Identify the associations to the other objects

·         Identify the multiplicity

·         List the attributes and operations associated with each object

6.   Build a glossary of definitions – actors, use cases and business objects

JAD Focus Groups

Iterative development requires that further analysis be done on user requirements to support each incremental release.  This requirement is addressed by having JAD-like sessions (focus groups) that build on the results of the requirements sessions.  The purpose of these focus groups is to drill down the requirements into a high-level design solution.  These focus groups are made up of the technical project team and business subject matter experts. 

JAD Focus Group Analysis (High Level Design) Session- Activity Steps:

1.  Provide a detailed definition of the use cases created in the requirements analysis phase.  The use case should describe the details of the user interaction with the system and have the associated screen shots or paper prototypes.

2.   Build use case views for each use case to show how the objects are used in the use case.

3.   Build the sequence diagram for use cases with more complicated workflows and refine the domain object models.

Pierson Requirements Group, Inc. provides the project teams with Agile Modeling Techniques for Collaborative Solutions — check out the class agenda

This is a good article to review on this subject.  http://www.startupcto.com/processes/business-vs-technical-requirements

Joy E. Matthews is the cofounder and Vice President of Training and Consulting Services for Pierson Requirements Group, Inc., (www.piersonrequirementsgroup.com), founded in 1990. She is an Information Systems Specialist with expertise in implementing Iterative Development and Joint Application Development using many development tools.  She is accomplished in business modeling and facilitation techniques.  She has participated in all phases of Information Engineering systems development and Total Quality Management projects.  She has successfully completed Business Process Re-engineering, Information Strategy Planning, Business Area Analysis, Functional Area Analysis and Business System Design projects for a number of organizations and is a certified facilitator.

Joy trains the latest in UML and the use case methodology using JAD.  She is an expert in JAD and UML best practices and industry standards.  She is the co-author of Pierson’s repeatable development Methodology for Multi-Tier Architecture projects using Object-Oriented methods and JAD.  Joy is the author of the JAD Facilitation and Requirements Gathering Seminar:  A Process for Implementing Object-Oriented Projects. She is accomplished in Object-Oriented Requirements Analysis, Analysis and Detailed Design.  She has facilitated and managed projects for all phases of the system development life cycle. 

Joy is the author of the following seminars:  Requirements Gathering & Writing Seminar using Data Techniques, JAD, UML and Use Cases, Business Analysis Seminar, Requirements Gathering & Writing Seminar using JAD, Use Cases and UML, User Acceptance Testing Seminar, Requirements & Specifications Seminar, Facilitated Session Leader Seminar, Learning Use Cases and UML Seminar and Writing Requirements That Work Seminar. Joy can be reached at jmatthews@piersonrequirementsgroup.com