Elicitation and Management of Rules, Requirements and Decisions

A manager of an enterprise architecture group recently asked me how to train business analysts to elicit or harvest rules effectively. We talked for a bit about the similarities in skills between rules and requirements and agreed that analysts will fail to understand rules as they fail to understand requirements.

For example, just substitute rules in the historical distribution of requirements failures:[1]

  • 34% Incorrect requirements
  • 24% Inadequate requirements
  • 22% Ambiguous requirements
  • 9% Inconsistent requirements
  • 4% Poor scoping of requirements
  • 4% Transcription errors in requirements
  • 3% New or changing requirements

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