What Is Requirements Gathering phase in the SDLC?

The first step in kicking off any project is requirement analysis, which is also known as the requirement gathering phase in the SDLC.

What is Requirements gathering?

Requirements gathering is one of the most essential parts of any project and contributes to its success on multiple levels. When budgets are small, timelines are tight, and the scope is limited, it becomes crucial to have precise documentation of all project requirements.

Requirements gathering is harder to do than people think. It is usually an area that people don’t pay enough attention to. Many projects encounter issues when it becomes clear that the customer’s needs were not fully understood and implemented.

A lot of projects fail because of a lack of good requirements gathering. Below, we will explain what exactly is involved in requirements gathering, why it is important, etc.

Why Is Requirements Gathering So Crucial?

After finishing a project, the number of questions to keep in mind:

What were the consequences?
What resources were needed?
Were there any budgetary or scope issues or shortcomings?
Which issues or shortcomings had the greatest overall impact?

If you don’t set specific requirements, like the scope, cost overrun, and deadlines, your whole project will be affected. This could make the design of the product worse or cause other delays. Your project won’t reach optimal success if you don’t have the necessary systems and processes.

What are the Benefits of Requirements Gathering?

A good requirements gathering process offers several benefits, beyond simply having requirements to work with. These include::

It increases the chances that customers and users will get what they want. Stakeholders often find it difficult to articulate exactly what they require. It will take some digging to help them.
Reduces the risk of project failure.
The project cost is lowered by catching requirements issues before development begins. Requirements that are unclear often lead to costly scrap and rework, and the cost of fixing requirements errors increases over time.

Dimensions of Requirement Gathering

There are several dimensions to requirements gathering:

Stakeholders

A stakeholder is a person or organization with an interest or concern in the outcome of a project, and who is affected by the system. For example, the user could be an end user or an administrator. The user could also be a software developer or a direct user. By collecting requirements from these stakeholders, it will be much easier to understand the system’s requirements.

Interviewing

Interviewing is a very effective method of gathering requirements. Different questions are being asked to stakeholders about the system and its uses in order to identify requirements using the answers. There are two types of interviewers:

1. Closed Interview: Stakeholders answer a predefined set of questions.
2. Open Interview: No predefined agenda. Various issues can be raised and discussed with stakeholders.

Use Case Modeling

Use cases are the fundamental building blocks of the modeling language, used to clearly present functionalities. The technique is scenario-based. Use case model can be used to identify individual interactions with the system. The use case model is an extremely effective tool for requirements gathering.

Facilitated Application Specification Technique (FAST)

The Facilitated Application Specification Technique is a process in which a team made up of customers and developers work together to identify a problem, come up with elements of a solution, negotiate different ways to solve the problem and write a specification for the initial set of requirements for solutions. At every FAST meeting, each attendee is asked for a list of objects, a list of services, and a list of constraints. Constraints of the system include cost, rules, memory requirement, and speed accuracy. When the FAST meeting starts, the need for a new product is the first issue that comes up. Everyone has to show their lists once everyone agrees that the product is worth it.