Requirements gathering spans throughout the project lifecycle, however most of them are finalized during the elaboration phase. This allows us to respond to change. At Ishi, we categorize requirements according to FURPS model and drive the requirements analysis process.

Use Case Modeling

We capture most of the functional requirements through Use Cases. They influence many aspects of a project including Domain Model and are input to many subsequent artifacts such as Requirements Scope, Test Model, Design Model and Supplementary Specifications.

Realizing Use Cases is the key to the success for translating requirements into design and development artifacts. For this, we need to understand their goal level and scope. While we use summary level business use cases in the Inception phase, we refine them to user goal level system use cases in the Elaboration phase.

UI Prototyping

It captures most of the human interface needs of the system. We tend to preserve UI prototypes in most cases for reuse in the project. We have developed several methods over the past ten years to manage this process effectively.

Web User Interfaces

We have two methods for prototyping user interfaces

• HTML Mocks
• Mocks using Microsoft Excel

We have found that using MS Excel for creating UI mocks has a number of benefits:

• Implementable - It conforms to the HTML table structure
• Interactive - It is made interactive using basic Excel functions and some VBA
• Availability - Excel is everywhere; so, users do not need additional software to review the prototype
• Feedback - Users can add comments in the Excel file
• Process – It is a lightweight process as Excel files can be emailed easily.

Supplementary Specifications

We use them to primarily capture all nonfunctional requirements, such as performance, reliability and security. During Inception, we capture high-level aspects, highlighting noteworthy quality attributes that expose major risks and challenges. We finalize most of the supplementary specifications in the Elaboration phase as the application architecture is more concrete by then.