The penny dropped after the first day of training with Suzanne. She gently guided us through the Volere process, which connected all the dots from beginning to end of what any BA needs to do to gather the right requirements. The ‘essence’ of a requirement is what to this day has helped differentiate my work from others, and led me to a successful career of 15 years working as a business analyst, using the Volere process as the guiding paradigm for all my work.

Volere is not about the template nor really just about requirements. It’s about understanding the business problem so that the requirements process can actually happen correctly. The Volere method makes it easier for discussion and provides techniques that can be used with stakeholders to analyse and describe what the solution needs to do in order for the business problem to be solved.

For business stakeholders, the requirements document is easy to read because it contains all the information they need in a top down manner – from the goals, objectives, stakeholders, right through to the diagrams describing the solution and the associated functional/non-functional requirements.

The key difficulties are shared amongst any requirements gathering efforts – business stakeholders love to talk about solutions. The Volere process help guide discussions away from solutions via the use of the context diagram, business events, and the partitioning of the work which leads to accurate descriptions of what the business needs to do in order to meet the objectives of the project.

Introducing the Volere process to an organization is best done through having a mini-project set up involving all the members of the BA practice. Both the business and the BA Practice need to change the way they work in order for the Volere process to be effectively embedded in an organization. Ideally, all BA practitioners should receive formal training of the Volere framework. The accompanying text – “Mastering the Requirements Process” – is a great book, however, in order to get all the BA practitioners on the one page, it would be best achieved through interactive, and collaborative training workshops with trained staff from the Atlantic Systems Guild.

This great result came about from your excellent training course and materials. Thank you so much for all your help

I presented the creative triggers first and then asked the participants tobrainstorm in small groups. Then I presented your experience using expertsgiving Neil Maiden's memorable performance at RE'04 as an example. ``Andy theauto mechanic``, our own expert, gave a 10 minute talk about how he performshis job. Then I asked the participants to come up with requirements makinganalogies between ``Andy's`` experiences and the domain we were studying.

Some participants thought that the order of the exercises should be reversedwhile others felt that the order was correct. Nevertheless, all of thegroups came up with useful requirements. My good experience with yourtechniques leads me to look forward to the next time I'm able to attend oneof your tutorials.

Thanks again.

Also check out the paper about my experiences using Volere I deliveredat the Requirements Engineering Conference in Kyoto in September 2004 http://mcs.open.ac.uk/dth46/

Migration of a logistics legacy application to Microsoft Navision (ERP system). We used Volere to analyse our needs.
At the company I work for we give computer courses (Excel, Word, ...). Each course room has to be installed with the right software for that course. We used Volere to set up the procedures for this process. The stakeholders who interact with ``the course preparation system`` are: trainers, trainees, the person who does the planning, the person who physically prepares the room, the person who installs the software on the PC's, etc...

Two websites projects
In September I'll start with the implementation of a few Navision modules to replace another application we have and I'll use Volere again! It's nice to see that even non-IT people understand the Volere concepts very well: goal(s) --> context diagram --> business events --> uses cases --> atomic requirements. The template makes it very easy to do it step by step.
Let me add that your Volere methodology is EXCELLENT! I took the course Mastering the Requirements Process in London in November 2002. I finished three projects using Volere. I can say that after 10 years I have finally found a methodology that is very well structured, is logical and easy to follow.

The power, to me, is that it focuses on only one thing: requirements. When this is done well, the rest follows (almost) naturally.

Furthermore, because we packaged the whole system as a hierarchy of use case packages, we found it was simplicity itself to apply a non-functional requirement to the whole system or part of the system, down to a single use case step.

There were a few drawbacks in that as you went up to the 'whole system' package the list of non-functionals got longer, (3 pages if I remember) but on the whole the client and the developer loved it. Any tool that allows the RE data to be linked in a similar fashion could be used I guess.

I finished my first complete requirements document last week for an added functionality in an application I helped develop a little over a year ago. I think the level of detail and comprehensiveness surprised the IT management and the developer

``I am currently using it to detail requirements for an electronic prescribing and decision support system to support reduction of medication errors and improve patient safety in a leading Australian cancer hospital.

I first became aware of your template when I attended your course about 3 years ago. The following is an outline of events since that time:

The template was first used in a very cut down form on a defense project. The fit criteria approach was used transform the requirement specification provided by Defense into a much clearer and more comprehensive document. The client was extremely impressed by the approach, as it was clear that had the system been built according to the original requirements it would not have been well received.

The template was used in the same limited form on a project for a large multi-national manufacturer. Once again the requirements were written prior to our involvement and fit criteria were used to expand upon and clarify what the client had written. As with the defense project, numerous inconsistencies and omissions were uncovered during the process.

After the positive results achieved on the above projects a Lotus Notes application was written to manage the collection of requirements. Various forms were created to mirror the different document types described in the Volere template. The application allows documents to be grouped and sorted by requirement type, source of the requirement etc. It also incorporates a work-flow allowing individual requirements to progress through an approval cycle i.e. each requirement passes through stages such as ``draft``, ``internally reviewed``, ``approved by client`` etc.

The Volere template approach and the associated Notes application were demonstrated to our management and subsequently adopted as the standard requirements gathering and documenting methodology for the Sydney office
The Notes application was integrated with MS Word to produce a printed specification for approval by the client
The automated product has since been used on an e-business application for a large pharmaceutical company and a reporting system for a hotel chain
The Notes application is about to be trialed by our office in Melbourne and is currently being evaluated by the offices in Canberra and Adelaide

Without exception the template approach, and in particular the use of fit criteria, has been enthusiastically received by both clients and analysts alike. There is no doubt that this approach has added significantly to the quality of our requirements specifications. The measurable nature of the requirements has also improved the effectiveness of our design validation process.

Please note that the Lotus Notes application described in this e-mail is a tool used by our analysts to aid the requirements analysis process, it is not sold as a commercial product.

If you would like any further information regarding our use of Volere, our future intentions, etc. please don't hesitate to drop me a line. Of course, if you have any free time during your upcoming visit to Sydney and would like to discuss things in person I would be only too happy to oblige.

``We`` are the 2nd largest Texas based bank (www.iboc.com), largest minority owned bank, and largest bank headquartered on the Texas/Mexico border. Will use the template again on replacement of legacy host with IBM S80 running Progress RDBMS/4GL development software. Multiple interfaces for front end systems, including web-based. Detailed back-end reporting and data warehousing.

I'll be personally writing the great majority of requirements doc using Volere — I'm just a hands on kinda guy.

Thanks for exceptional insight, clarity, & organization. It's making a positive difference in a very complex undertaking.

I started life as a business systems analyst so I have some idea as to how complex the defintion of requriements is. Your stuff is the best I have seem. Historically I would have agreed with you that Privacy was jsut a subset of Security. However, there are a number of things happening that change that.

My current client is having to go back and do formal Privacy impact assessment on existing and proposed systems because of new legislation enacted in Canada. This is turning out to be a big job. (The law is very simple; its less then a page long. In effect it says, you must tell people why you want to collect data, you must have their informed consent before you collect it, and the data cannot be used for any other purpose then what they were told). There are some other laws that that is the big one.

I look forward to your future work