Lateral Thinking Test

1) A person shoots her wife. Then holds her under water for 5 minutes. Finally, he hangs her. But after 10 minutes they both go out together and enjoy a wonderful dinner together. How can this be?


2) You have 10 Jars filled with marbles. Each marble weighs 10 gm, except one Jar which contains defective marbles which weighs 9 gm. Given a scale to weigh, How do you find Jar with defective marbles in just one measurement. Here scale is modern day electronic scale to measure weight.


3)There are 27 coins and a two-pan balance. All coins has same weight except for one, which is heavier than all others. All coins looks identical. What is the minimum number of weighing required to certainly find out heavier coin?


4) There are two sticks which takes one hour to burn from one end to other. The sticks do not burn at a constant rate i.e. some part may burn faster than others. You need to measure 45 minutes by using these two sticks and a lighter.


5) A father and son are going in a car and suddenly there car met accident. Father died on the spot but the child rushed to the hospital. When he arrives in the hospital, doctor says, "I can't operate on this child, he is my son!" How can this be?


6) Two persons are walking into a railway tunnel. Upon crossing 2/3rd of the tunnel, they saw train is coming from opposite direction. Each person ran for a different end of tunnel with speed of 10 km per hour. Fortunately, both persons escaped from the tunnel just right time i.e.. at the time train would have run through them. Assuming train was running with a constant speed and both persons reacted immediately, Find out speed of train.


7) There are thee switches outside of a closed room to operate three different light bulb inside the room. You can only go into the room once and you need to determine which switch belongs to which bulb. Just to make it clear, room is perfectly locked and its not possible to determine whether lights are on from outside the room.


8) There are Four people needs to cross the bridge during night. The bridge can hold the weight of two people at a time and can not be crossed without a torch. Each person walk with different speed, first can cross the bridge in 1 minutes, second in 2 minutes, third in 5 minutes and fourth take 10 minutes to cross the bridge. If two persons go together, they walk with the speed of slower person. What is the least amount in which all four people cross the bridge.


9) A person's age is many days as his father's age in weeks and as many month as his grand father's age in years. If you combine age of all three it comes 120 years. What is the age of all three?


10) You have a 5 liter Jug and a 3 liter Jug and unlimited supply of water. You need to measure exactly 4 liter of water but there is no measuring instrument or cup. Also Jugs are oddly shaped and doesn't contain any mark.

Post your Answers!

Six Thinking Hats - Simple & effective lateral thinking & decison making technique

'Six Thinking Hats' is powerful thinking technique. It helps to think decisions from a number of important perspectives. It challenges your habitual style of thinking, and helps you to get more logical view on decisions.

This technique was introduced by the writer Edward de Bono in his book “Six Thinking Hats” in 1985.

The underlying principles are based on human psychology and it challenges the way the human brain thinks.

Many of us think from very rational and positive viewpoint but may fail to look at a problem from an emotional, intuitive, creative or negative viewpoint. It means that resistance to plans are underestimated and at the end we fail to make creative leaps and do not make essential contingency plans.

Similarly, pessimists may be excessively defensive, and more emotional people may fail to look at decisions calmly and rationally.

If we look at a problem with the 'Six Thinking Hats' technique, our decisions and plans will mix ambition, skill in execution, public sensitivity, creativity and good contingency planning.

How to Use “Six Thinking Hats”

• It is an effective yet simple system that increases productivity. 

• There are six metaphorical hats and each defines a certain type of thinking. 

• You can put on or take off one of these hats to indicate the type of thinking you are using. 

• This putting on and taking off is essential, because it allows you to switch from one type of thinking to another. 

• When done in a group, everybody should wear the same hat at the same time. 

• The principle behind the 'Six Thinking Hats' is parallel thinking which ensures that all the people in a meeting are focused on and thinking about the same subject at the same time. 

• In this system, thinking is divided into six categories with each category identified with its own coloured metaphorical 'thinking hat'. 

• Organisations that use the 'Six Thinking Hats' system report that their teams are more productive and in general "happier and healthier". 

Each 'Thinking Hat' is a different style of thinking. These are explained below:

	White Hat Thinking- Facts Information and data Neutral and objective What do I know? What do I need to find out? How will I get the information I need?
	Yellow Hat Thinking- Benefits Positives, plus points Logical reasons are given. Why an idea is useful
	Black Hat Thinking - Cautions Difficulties, weaknesses, dangers Logical reasons are given. Spotting the risks
	Red Hat Thinking - Feelings Intuition, hunches, gut instinct My feelings right now. Feelings can change. No reasons are given
	Green Hat Thinking - Creativity Ideas, alternative, possibilities Provocation - "PO" Solutions to black hat problems
	Blue Hat Thinking- Process Thinking about thinking What thinking is needed? Organizing the thinking Planning for action

White Hat:

• When you put on your white hat, you focus directly on the information and data available– what is available, what is needed, and how it might be obtained. Proposals, opinions, beliefs and arguments should be put aside.

• Look at the information you have, and see what you can learn from it. Look for gaps in your knowledge, and either try to fill them or take account of them.

• This is where you analyze past trends, and try to extrapolate from historical data.

• The white hat covers facts, figures, data and information. Too often facts and figures are embedded in an argument or belief. 

• Wearing your white hat allows you to present information in a neutral and objective way. 

Questions you might ask while wearing your white hat include: 

• What information do we have here? 
• What information is missing? 
• What information would we like to have? 
• How are we going to get the information? 

Yellow Hat:

• Yellow symbolizes brightness, positive aspects and optimism

• The yellow hat helps you to think positively. It is the optimistic viewpoint that helps you to look for all the benefits of the decision, feasibility, the value in it and how something can be done. 

• Yellow hat thinking is a deliberate search for the positive. Benefits are not always immediately obvious and you might have to search for them. Every creative idea deserves some yellow hat attention.

• Yellow Hat thinking helps you to keep going when everything looks gloomy and difficult.. 

Questions you might ask while wearing the yellow hat include:

• What are the benefits of this option? 
• Why is this proposal preferable? 
• What are the positive assets of this design? 
• How can we make this work? 

Black Hat:

• It symbolizes judgement, evaluation and caution. It is often referred as devil’s advocate. 

• Using black hat thinking, look at all the bad points of the decision. Look at it cautiously and defensively. It allows you to consider your proposals critically and logically. 

• Black Hat thinking helps to make your plans 'tougher' and more resilient. It can also help you to spot fatal flaws and risks before you embark on a course of action. 

• Black Hat thinking is one of the real benefits of this technique, as many successful people get so used to thinking positively that often they cannot see problems in advance. This leaves them under-prepared for difficulties.

• Mistakes can be disastrous. So the black hat is very valuable. It is the most used hat and possibly the most useful hat. However, it is very easy to overuse the black hat. Caution, used too early in the problem solving process, can easily kill creative ideas with early negativity. 

Wearing your black hat you might consider the following:

• Costs. (This proposal would be too expensive.) 
• Regulations. (I don't think that the regulations would allow … ) 
• Design. (This design might look nice, but it is not practical.) 
• Materials. (This material would mean high maintenance.) 
• Safety issues. (What about handrails?) 

Red Hat:

• Red hat symbolizes feelings, emotions, hunches and intuitions.

• Wearing' the red hat, you look at problems using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion. Also try to think how other people will react emotionally. Try to understand the responses of people who do not fully know your reasoning.

• This hat helps us to express emotions and feelings such as fear, likes, dislikes, loves and hates.

• Usually, feelings and intuition can only be introduced into a discussion if they are supported by logic. Often, the feeling is genuine but the logic is spurious. 

• Wearing the red hat allows you to put forward your feelings and intuitions without the need for justification, explanation or apology. 

Examples:

• My gut-feeling is that this will not work. 
• I don't like the way this is being done. 
• This proposal is terrible. 
• My intuition tells me that prices will fall soon. 

Green Hat:

• The Green Hat stands for creativity and new ideas. It focuses on possibilities and alternatives. This is where you can develop creative solutions to a problem. It is a freewheeling way of thinking, in which there is little criticism of ideas. 

• The green hat makes time and space available to focus on creative thinking. Even if no creative ideas are forthcoming, the green hat asks for the creative effort. 

• Often green hat thinking is difficult because it goes against our habits of recognition, judgment and criticism. 

The green hat is specifically concerned with below listed thinking processes

• creative thinking 
• Additional alternatives 
• putting forward possibilities and hypotheses 
• interesting proposals 
• new approaches 
• provocations and changes 

Typical questions include:

• Are there any other ideas here? 
• Are there any additional alternatives? 
• Could we do this in a different way? 
• Could there be another explanation? 

Blue Hat:

• The Blue Hat stands for control mechanism. It ensures that six thinking hats guidelines are observed. This is the hat worn by people chairing meetings. When running into difficulties because ideas are running dry, they may direct activity into Green Hat thinking. When contingency plans are needed, they will ask for Black Hat thinking, etc.

• Controlling the sequence of thinking 

• The blue hat is the overview or process control. It is for organizing and controlling the thinking process so that it becomes more productive. 

• The blue hat is for thinking about thinking. In technical terms, the blue hat is concerned with meta-cognition. 

Wearing your blue hat, you might:

• Look not at the subject itself but at the 'thinking' about the subject. 
• Set the agenda for thinking 
• Suggest the next step in the thinking, "
• suggest we try some green hat thinking to get some new ideas" 
• Ask for a summary, conclusion, or decision, "Could we have a summary of your views?"

Conclusion:

Six Thinking Hats is a good technique for looking at decision from various points of view.
It allows necessary emotion and skepticism to be brought into discussion without looking for any rationals. It opens up the opportunity for creativity. It helps both pessimistic and optimistic people by challenging their habitual way of thinking.

Backlog Grooming Meeting (BGM) - Top 10 tips to groom user story

1. Never schedule BGM during the first 20% or last 20% of the Sprint or iteration

During the first 20% of the Sprint, the team is just getting started on this Sprint's work, so you'll want to give them some room to get a good start. During the last 20% of the Sprint, the team is working hard to get closure on the current sprint items, so that's not really an ideal time to do it either. That middle 60% of the sprint is a good time to do backlog grooming

2. Treat BGM like the first part of sprint or iteration Planning Meeting

This BGM is often called as the “What” of the planning meeting. The Product owner presents the user stories/backlog items to the team. Backlog items are clarified to team and then team estimates each item. The priorities might change based on the estimates.

3.Present enough work to last about 2 Sprints or iterations beyond the current sprint.

There are 2 reasons for this.

-          If more PBI (Product backlog item) is de-prioritized, there must be enough work leftover to fill an iteration or sprint.

-          It is also a good practice to have some of finely groomed PBI’s beyond what you are working on in a print in case someone frees up and need more work.

4. The backlog items must have an initial set of acceptance tests defined before the meeting occurs

When the PO brings a backlog item to the meeting, it should not be a first draft or basic gist of information.  The PBI must have well defined acceptance criteria.

Even if the initial acceptance tests are high level, that is better than no acceptance tests at all. The more the PO and team focus on getting to good detailed acceptance tests, the better.

5. Estimates are not final until a PBI/story has been accepted into a sprint.

Do not let the team stress out too much on the estimates since the team is just getting a preview of the PBI's. Acknowledge the team that the PBI's estimate is not final until the PBI has been accepted into the sprint or iteration. Team members are free to bring any new information up and re-estimate the PBI.

6. Product Backlog order is not final until a PBI has been accepted into a sprint.

The PO can change the backlog order between BGM and Planning session. But make sure that the changing order too frequently might frustrate the team.

7. Keep an eye on meeting goals

There are 3 goals that must be met at the end of BGM.

-          The team must have enough work queued up for next iteration/sprint & team must be confident about their upcoming work.

-          Any major questions or concerns must be answered/addressed

-          The risks must be identified and high level mitigation plan must be in place

8. Feel free to split the PBI’s during BGM

     Do not keep PBI with more than 8 points. Split the fatty PBI and re-estimate them as if they are new       and independent PBI.

9. Experiment with amount of grooming that the team does

At initials stages you may need more grooming sessions until your team is 2 iterations ahead. The usual time box for grooming is 10% of the development time in the sprint or iteration. But there     are no hard and fast rules. Experiment with the time box and find out comfortable BGM duration for the team.

10. Retrospect, Inspect & Adapt

It is much important that the team inspects and adapts their practices. If team feels that the BGM is waste of time, then there are hidden impediments that should be removed at once. It is 

recommended to do 5 why’s analysis for better backlog grooming sessions.

INVEST on user story

INVEST on User Story- Definition of agile user story

What is User Story?

Agile methods typically tend to be “lighter weight” specifications and requirements are written as user stories.

A user story is a high level description of system behavior. It is not a full specification of the requirement but a placeholder for conversation about the requirement. The user story will be fully specified as it is brought into an iteration or development cycle.

Once delivered, a user story represents a fully functional (although possibly incomplete) slice of the overall system. Several in the agile community have suggested guidelines to help us determine what makes a good user story.

INVEST Model:

Bill Wake author of “Composing User Stories” defined the INVEST model for requirements definition. INVEST is the mnemonic to remember the characteristics of a good quality user story.

Independent

• Avoid dependencies with other stories

• Write stories to establish foundation

• Combine stories if possible to deliver in a single iteration

Negotiable

• Stories are not a contract

• Too much detail up front gives the impression that more discussion on the story is not necessary

• Not every story must be negotiable, constraints may exist that prevent it

Valuable

• Each story should show value to the Users, Customers, and Stakeholders

Estimable

• Enough detail should be listed to allow the team to estimate

• The team will encounter problems estimating if the story is too big, if insufficient information is provided, or if there is a lack of domain knowledge

Sized Appropriately

• Each story should be small enough to be completed in a single iteration

• Stories that may be worked on in the near future should be smaller and more detailed

• Larger stories are acceptable if planned further out (Epics)

Testable

• Acceptance criteria should be stated in customer terms

• Tests should be automated whenever possible

• All team members should demand clear acceptance criteria

Conclusion:

Success in today’s economy requires us to respond quickly to changing market conditions and business needs. Traditional product delivery methodologies cannot deliver fast enough in highly uncertain project domains. Agile methodology allow teams to meet the changing demands of the customers while creating environments where team members want to work.

The Business Analyst can play a key role on an agile team. To be successful, BA first need to shift their traditional requirements thinking. Additionally, BA need to consider learning new skills for writing requirements and new techniques for managing them. Success will depend largely on how well BA adapt to these new ways of working with requirements, setting up teams, and using group collaboration.

Depending on the level of formality required by an organization, BA will want to consider using either use cases or user stories.

Know your 7 types of powers!

Know your 7 types of powers which can help shaping you in workplace

There are mainly 7 types of powers and are comes in many different forms. Everyone must learn how to use and handle each type of power to shape the work place and team. These power can make enormous changes in your personal life as well if they are used appropriately. 

Psychologist Nicole Lipkin discusses the different types of power in her new book, "What Keeps Leaders Up At Night." 

TYPES OF POWER

 

POSITIONAL POWER

1. Legitimate Power 

• Power derived from a job, position, or status and held as belonging to the person in such a position.
• Legitimate power is where a person in a higher position has control over people in a lower position in an organization.
• Rewards and Punishments to subordinates are general parts of legitimate power. 
• Not strong enough to be one's only form of influencing/persuading.
• If you have this power, it's essential that you understand that this power was given to you (and remember it can be taken away), so do not abuse it.

2. Coercive Power

• It is where a person leads threats and force. It is unlikely to win respect and loyalty from this power.
• Using coercive power is forcing someone to do something that he/she does not desire to do by using threats. However coercion has also been associated positively with generally punitive behavior and negatively associated to contingent reward behaviour.

• it generally involves abuse and leads to unhealthy behaviour and dissatisfaction.
• Credibility cannot be built with coercive influence
• Examples of coercive power : receiving a poor performance review, having prime projects taken away, fear of losing one’s job

3. Reward Power

• It is where a person motivates others by offering raises, promotions, and awards.
• “When you start talking financial livelihood, power takes on a whole new meaning” according to Lipkin.
• Reward power is conveyed through rewarding individuals for compliance with one’s wishes.
• Examples of reward power are giving bonuses, raises, a promotion, extra time off from work                    

PERSONAL POWER

4. Expert Power 

• It is the perception that one possesses superior skills or knowledge.
• Expert power comes from one’s experiences, skills or knowledge.
• Experts need to continue learning and improving in order to keep their status and influence.
• For example, the Project Manager who is an expert at solving particularly challenging problems to ensure a project stays on track

5. Informational Power

• It is where a person possesses needed or wanted information. 
• It is a short-term power that doesn't necessarily influence or build credibility.
• For example, a project manager may have all the information for a specific project, and that will give her "informational power." But it's hard for a person to keep this power for long, and eventually this information will be released.
• It should not be used as  long-term strategy.

6. Connection Power

• It is where a person attains influence by gaining favor or simply acquaintance with a powerful person. 
• This power is all about networking.
• “If I have a connection with someone that you want to get to, that's going to give me power. That's politics in a way," Lipkin says.
• People employing this power build important coalitions with others

7. Referent Power

• It is the ability to convey a sense of personal acceptance or approval. It is held by people with charisma, integrity, and other positive qualities.
• It is the most valuable type of power when used positively.
• The referent power is sometimes associated with positional when it is negatively used

• People with high referent power can highly influence anyone who admires and respects them.

Me & My Shadow – A technique to understand our customer

Goal: Identify Customers’ Hidden Needs

Designers have a wealth of ideas on how their products can and should be used. To learn about customers, we need to watch our customer using our product on their terms, not on our terms.

Me & my shadow is the game of observing our customer while they use our product or service. Literally, sit next to them and watch what they do. This technique is one of many that falls under the broad category of ethnographic research. Ethnographic research is an incredibly powerful way of understanding our customer. Periodically ask them “Why are you doing that?” and “What are you thinking?” Take along a camera or camcorder and record key activities. Ask for copies of important artifacts created or used by your customer while they are doing the work.

Though it is one of the effective techniques, it comes with a catch: It is very hard to observe our customer in such a way that our observations do not change the way they work, kind of like the Heisenberg principle applied to people. That is the reason why the name of this game emphasizes thinking of our self as a shadow of the customer, so that we can minimize any negative interactions caused by our observations.

Sophisticated applications of this technique are based on specially selected customers being asked to perform activities while being studied in specially constructed observation rooms. While this can be an extraordinary way to uncover hidden requirements, the process is expensive and the setting tends to be artificial. Me and My Shadow works best when we can observe your customer in their native habitat.

Product Box - A super worthy agile planning game

Product Box 

It is one of the most powerful and useful agile game in recent years that many agile teams have benefited from. This post shall help to understand what it is and how is it useful.

Every commodity that we buy from the market is wrapped in a box or a cover. The box is the primary medium for the manufacturing companies to market and convince customers that their product is better than the competition placed alongside.

Look at the below picture, the product company has effectively displayed their significant product details in limited print space.

The product box provides limited print space, that the manufacturing company has to efficiently utilize to showcase their best features to market the product.

How to play Product Box Game?

1. Divide the participants into multiple teams.
2. Provide each team a blank chart paper wrapped box.
3. Arrange for stationary items like multicoloured sketch pens, post-its, crayons, cartoon stickers etc.
4. Ask each team to efficiently utilize the box outer surface to sell/market the product they are currently developing (or planning to develop)
5. Time-box the product box creation/decoration activity (approx 20 mins – the lesser the time, the faster the brain imagines!!)
6. Once all product boxes are ready, one representative from each team should market the product to the audience (rest of the teams) by explaining all that is illustrated on the box.
7. Once each team is finished demonstrating its product box, ask all participants to vote for the best product box excluding their own product box.
8. The Product box with the maximum votes wins!!

Benefits of playing product box game:

• The game helps in release planning a product. To create an attractive product box, the participants have to imagine hard as to what could be the set of features/USPs that your product would offer.
• If you are a product manager, playing this game with the team helps is gauging how much the team understands the product they are developing. The better the team understands the business value of the product, the comfortable they are in developing it and in coming up with valuable ideas for the same.
• Agile CSM/Product Owner training is a good place to play this game. Once the product box is ready, it can help in creating user stories for project simulations that are a part of the training.

Speed Boat - An Agile Retrospection Game

Speed Boat:

Objective:

• What is driving your boat (Sprint, project, or Agile adoption forward)

• What are the anchors slowing it down?

Game explained:

One of the most important facet that the agile world exposes is seeking feedback. Deriving feedback as a team for the team is the most essential element that makes the team.

Speed boat an Agile Innovation Game is a fun way of doing a retrospective, it engages participants and also delivers value.

As an example, consider your (Speed boat) to be your iteration. A successful Iteration is the one that has completed its projected velocity (The Island)

1. On the post-it’s given to you, write down things that you as a team did well during the iteration. Things that kept you moving. (The Engine)
2. On the post-its given to you, write down what did NOT go well with respect to your iteration. Hindrances caused. (The Anchors)
3. Time limit is 10 minutes each
4. Once we have the feedback, collate it remove redundancy and create themes
5. Then pick up each theme and prioritize it using dot voting (See my blog on “dot voting” to know more)
6. Continue to do what has surfaced as things that have gone well during the iteration (Engine)
7. Pick up the extremely painful anchors and plan to mitigate them

These painful anchors are the ones that need to be removed in order to ensure the speed boat sails swiftly and reaches the island safely

What did we learn from this?

• Surface hopes and concerns
• Motivate people to think
• Agree as a team
• Plan to mitigate early in the cycle

Where can we use this exercise?

• In a “retrospective meeting” to discover what went right or wrong
  
  
• This game helps elicits the key pain points that a team/organization is currently going through. we can use this information to derive the transformation program required for the team/organization

Note: Alternatively you can play "Flight Fly" considering Flight in place of boat. The luggages in place of anchors.

Prune the Product Tree

Prune the Product Tree

Goal: Shape the Product to Market Needs

Gardeners prune trees to control their growth. Sometimes the pruning is artistic, and we end up with shrubs shaped like animals or interesting abstract shapes. Much of the time the pruning is designed to build a balanced tree that yields high quality fruit. The process is not about ‘cutting,” it is about “shaping.” Use this metaphor to help create the product that your customers desire.

The Game:

This "Prune the Product Tree" game is customized for analyzing the benefits of attending a conference.

Start by drawing a very large tree on a whiteboard or printing a tree as a poster. Thick limbs represent major areas of functionality within your system. The edge of the tree – its outermost branches – represents the features available in the current release. Write potential new features on several index cards, ideally shaped as leaves. Ask your customers to place desired features around the tree, defining the next phase of its growth. Do they structure a tree that is growing in a balanced manner? Does one branch – perhaps a core feature of the product – get the bulk of the growth? Does an underutilized aspect of the tree become stronger? We know that the roots of a tree (your support and customer care infrastructure) need to extend at least as far as your canopy. Do yours?

Why It Works

You and your customers both know that features vary in importance. So, we tend to want to put our efforts behind the most important features ad those features that provide the greatest value to customers. Unfortunately, sometimes this means that we put too little effort behind the features that are needed to complete the product. The Prune The Product Tree game provides your customers with a way to provide input into the decision making process by looking at the set of features that comprise the product in a holistic manner.

Learning Matrix - An Innovative Agile Retrospection Game

Learning Matrix

Goal: Think of Effective Improvements for Your Iteration

Iteration retrospective activities are tricky; it is often difficult to think of practical improvements, and reflecting on negative aspects of the project can leave our team feeling upset and unmotivated.

A great way to prevent these from occurring is to play a game that focuses on the positives while also pointing out aspects that need to be changed. As described in Diana Larsen and Esther Derby’s Agile Retrospectives, Learning Matrix does just this. In this game, teams collaborate to identify what they liked and disliked about a past project, and to point out whom they appreciated and what they believe should be altered for the future. Whether analyzing the results of a conference, product, or meeting, Learning Matrix can help us uncover your top-priority items to enhance the iteration.

Game Explained:

Before the meeting, create a 2×2 matrix. Draw a picture in each quadrant to represent a different aspect involved in retrospective analysis:

• Quadrant 1: Frown face for aspects disliked, should be changed
• Quadrant 2: Smiley face for aspects liked, should be repeated
• Quadrant 3: Light bulb for new ideas to try
• Quadrant 4: Bouquet for people appreciated

Provide players with plenty of sticky notes and markers. Allow 5-10 minutes for participants to individually write down their ideas for the four topics on separate notes. After all players are done writing their ideas, ask them to present their sticky notes to the group and to post them on the designated sections of the chart.

Narrow down the notes to a few requiring immediate attention. To do this, give each player 6 – 10 dot stickers, which they will use to dot vote for the ideas they believe are top-priority. Resolve ties by discussing which note is more pressing or having another dot vote. Count all the votes to determine which ideas should be focused on. Narrowing ideas down is important, as it allows the team to concentrate on priorities and increases the chance of effective improvements being made.

Move the notes around to reflect the order of priority. Collaborate to evaluate how these ideas can be used to enhance our next iteration and discuss where we can begin making improvements.

This exercise allows you to perform retrospective analysis while maintaining a positive environment. By organizing our team thoughts, We can lay out our plan for improvement and discover how to enhance our project for the future. Collaborate to identify what should be repeated, changed, or tried, and to congratulate team members for a job well-done.

Requirement Gathering Techniques

Requirement Gathering Techniques

The BABoK (Business Analyst Body of Knowledge) lists 10 techniques for gathering requirements.

Here I have posted an overview of each one. For more details, check out the latest Guide to the BABoK.

1.  Brainstorming
2. Document Analysis
3. Focus Group
4. Interface Analysis
5. Interview
6. Observation
7. Prototyping
8. Requirements Workshop
9. Reverse Engineering
10. Survey

1. Brainstorming

Brainstorming is used in requirements elicitation to get as many ideas as possible from a group of people. Generally used to identify possible solutions to problems, and clarify details of opportunities. Brainstorming casts a wide net, identifying many different possibilities. Prioritization of those possibilities is important to finding the needles in the haystack.

2. Document Analysis

Reviewing the documentation of an existing system can help when creating AS-IS process documents, as well as driving gap analysis for scoping of migration projects. In an ideal world, we would even be reviewing the requirements that drove creation of the existing system – a starting point for documenting current requirements. Nuggets of information are often buried in existing documents that help us ask questions as part of validating requirement completeness.

3. Focus Group

A focus group is a gathering of people who are representative of the users or customers of a product to get feedback. The feedback can be gathered about needs / opportunities / problems to identify requirements, or can be gathered to validate and refine already elicited requirements. This form of market research is distinct from brainstorming in that it is a managed process with specific participants. There is danger in “following the crowd”, and some people believe focus groups are at best ineffective. One risk is that we end up with the lowest common denominator features.

4. Interface Analysis

Interfaces for a software product can be human or machine. Integration with external systems and devices is just another interface. User centric design approaches are very effective at making sure that we create usable software. Interface analysis – reviewing the touch points with other external systems – is important to make sure we don’t overlook requirements that aren’t immediately visible to users.

5. Interview

Interviews of stakeholders and users are critical to creating the great software. Without understanding the goals and expectations of the users and stakeholders, we are very unlikely to satisfy them. We also have to recognize the perspective of each interviewee, so that we can properly weigh and address their inputs. Like a great reporter, listening is the skill that helps a great analyst to get more value from an interview than an average analyst.

6. Observation

The study of users in their natural habitats is what observation is about. By observing users, an analyst can identify a process flow, awkward steps, pain points and opportunities for improvement. Observation can be passive or active (asking questions while observing). Passive observation is better for getting feedback on a prototype (to refine requirements), where active observation is more effective at getting an understanding of an existing business process. Either approach can be used to uncover implicit requirements that otherwise might go overlooked.

7. Prototyping

Prototypes can be very effective at gathering feedback. Low fidelity prototypes can be used as an active listening tool. Often, when people can not articulate a particular need in the abstract, they can quickly assess if a design approach would address the need. Prototypes are most efficiently done with quick sketches of interfaces and storyboards. Prototypes are even being used as the “official requirements” in some situations.

8. Requirements Workshop

More commonly known as a joint application design (JAD) session, workshops can be very effective for gathering requirements. More structured than a brainstorming session, involved parties collaborate to document requirements. One way to capture the collaboration is with creation of domain-model artifacts (like static diagrams, activity diagrams). A workshop will be more effective with two analysts than with one, where a facilitator and a scribe work together.

9. Reverse Engineering

Is this a starting point or a last resort? When a migration project does not have access to sufficient documentation of the existing system, reverse engineering will identify what the system does. It will not identify what the system should do, and will not identify when the system does the wrong thing.

10. Survey

When collecting information from many people – too many to interview with budget and time constraints – a survey or questionnaire can be used. The survey can force users to select from choices, rate something (“Agree Strongly, Agree, disagree…”), or have open ended questions allowing free-form responses. Survey design is hard – questions can bias the respondents. Don’t assume that you can create a survey on your own, and get meaningful insight from the results. I would expect that a well designed survey would provide qualitative guidance for characterizing the market. It should not be used for prioritization of features or requirement

Reference: BABoK