Visual Studio ALM Rangers Requirements Engineering Guidance 2010

Reference Guide

This reference document provides the “Guide to the Guide” for the Requirements Engineering Guidance in Visual

Studio Team Foundation Server 2010.

This reference was necessary due to the size of the guide (well over 140 pages of material). Because the size of

the guide can be intimidating, we offer up this reference table to provide you with a “Cheat Sheet” that will allow

you to quickly navigate to the section of the guide that provides support for an immediate conceptual need in

Requirements Engineering.

Treat the guide as a comprehensive reference to nine (9) separate disciplines within the realm of requirements

engineering. Each topic section on its own provides between 10 and 20 pages of material that describes the topic

concepts, processes, and techniques for using Team Foundation Server to support them.

Requirements Engineering Reference Table

Topic Overview Description Content Sections

1. Introduction The goal of this guidance is to provide formalized Microsoft field experience in the form of recommended procedures and processes, Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server configurations, and skill development references for the Requirements Engineering discipline of your application lifecycle. Due to the variability and breadth of methodologies used throughout the industry, this guidance takes on this objective in three (3) ways.

Generic Requirements Engineering

Traditional Development

Agile Development

High Level Requirements Engineering Scenario – Sets context on RE – pg. 6

Disclaimer – pg. 9

Visual Studio ALM Rangers – pg. 10

Vocabulary – pg. 10

2. Requirements Management Planning

A Requirements Management Plan should be developed to specify the information and control mechanisms which will be collected and used for measuring, reporting, and controlling changes to the product requirements.

Generic Methodology-Free Elements – pg. 15

Documenting the plan

Traceability

Roles and Responsibilities

Requirements Attributes

Reporting

Tools

Change Management

Workflow and Activities

Planning Tasks for Elicitation

Scrum / Agile Elements – pg. 21

Traditional Elements – pg. 23

3. Requirements Traceability is probably the most important dimension Generic Traceability – pg.

Traceability of requirements engineering in that it provides accountability to an application development team. In addition, it helps:

Identify the source and importance of requirements

Manage the scope of the project

Manage changes to requirements

Assess the project impact of a changes to a requirement or other element of the project

Assess the impact of a failure of a test on requirements (i.e. test failure may mean the requirement is not satisfied)

Verify that all requirements of the system are fulfilled by the implementation

Verify that the application does only what it was intended to do

Gives the developer a requirements context for his task

When implemented effectively, traceability will provide a map of the business stakeholders’ needs to solution features, to product functionality, to its design against the application architecture, its tests, and, ultimately, the source code and data written to implement the solution. With such a broad reach through the artifacts of a project, it makes sense that traceability is a realization of an organization’s defined development methodology.

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Traceability Strategy

Tests and Traceability

Typed Links between artifacts

Using links for documentation

Customizable Traceability

Governance

The “Infamous” Traceability Matrix

Guidance for Agile Projects – pg. 41

Guidance for Traditional Projects – pg. 42

4. Analysis and Breakdown

Analysis and Validation is performed to:

Establish Operational Concepts and Scenarios (Product Requirements – e.g. user goals and context diagrams, Product Component Requirements – e.g. technical constraints and operational concepts)

Establish and maintain a definition of required functionality (Functional Architecture, Activity diagrams and use cases, object-oriented analysis with services identified)

Analyze Requirements (Requirements defects/volatility, Requirements Changes, Technical Performance measures, Assessment of risks)

Validate Requirements with Comprehensive Methods (Record of analysis methods and results)

Plan the implementation of requirements

Overview – pg. 43

Analysis and Breakdown Process – pg. 43

Business Analysis

Test Plan Configuration

Functional Level Analysis

Technical Level Analysis

Task Analysis and Project Planning

Final Thoughts – pg. 66

(identification of work tasks) 5. Requirements

Elicitation This document will describe the elicitation of requirements at each of its evolutionary levels within the parameters of two different methodology types; traditional application development and agile methods. Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server provide the common technology between both methodology types and serves as the planning, storage, tracking, and reporting repository for all elicitation activity.

Overview – pg. 67

Generic Elicitation Topics – pg. 68

Elicitation Planning

Elicitation Techniques

Agile Elicitation – pg. 82

Traditional Elicitation – pg. 84

6. Requirements Specification

Regardless of which point in the hierarchy that one is eliciting requirements (Business, System, or Implementation), there are some core features of Team Foundation Server 2010 that we need to understand mechanically for specifying a requirement and its validation. This section covers the act of documenting various elements of requirements in as work items or other means.

Overview – pg. 86

Specifying Requirements (the Basics) -–pg. 86

Creating work items for requirements

Linking test cases to a work item

Scope Specification – pg. 89

System Requirements Specification – pg. 91

Implementation Specification – pg. 92

Final Thoughts – pg. 93

7. Requirements Validation

Validation is a process to assess if the end product is going to satisfy customer requirements. Validation assists in ensuring that requirements are not misunderstood. This approach to delivery has recently been described as “Test-First Development” or “Requirements-Based Testing”.

Overview – pg. 95

Techniques – pg. 96

Test Plans – pg. 96

Checklists – pg. 104

Inspection – pg. 105

Technology Support – pg. 105

CMMI Specific – pg. 106

8. Requirements Change Management and Approval

Requirements Change Management and Approval describes how a practitioner will formally capture the approvals for new requirements or changes/enhancements to existing requirements. Focus in this area will be on workflow describing a requirements change process, management of requirements baselines and authorizations to continue on requirements realization. Attention to rigor in this topic area will lead to compliance to industry measures such as CMMI and ITIL and compliance with industry regulations like FDA CFR-21, Part 11 and Sarbanes-Oxley can be achieved.

Overview – pg. 109

Generic Scenarios – pg. 108

New Requirements

Enhancement Requests

Requirements Defects

In-Flight Discoveries

Team Foundation Server Support for Scenarios – pg. 109

Preparing for Baseline Management

Striking a Baseline

In-Phase Baseline Management

Approving the Baseline

Mechanics of Comparing 2 Baselines

Change Management Process

The Approval Process

Setting up a Team site to accommodate an approval process

Final thoughts – pg. 131

9. Impact Analysis

Overview – pg. 132

Stories for Impact Analysis – pg. 133

Impact Analysis Process – pg. 133

Review Enhancement Request

Identify Impacted Functional Areas

Identify Impacted Test Cases

Identify Impacted Source Code

Estimate the Work

Report the Impacts and Wait for Authorization

Final comments – pg. 138

10. 3rd

Party Integrations

A preliminary look at software product vendors that provide solutions to requirements engineering capabilities for which Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server are challenged

Overview – pg. 139

TeamSpec

stpSoft

Ravenflow

IBM DOORS

11. Supplements In addition to the guide, there is a spreadsheet that contains many requirements analysis and validation checklists that might be helpful to your requirements engineering best practices. There are also some document templates for Requirements Management Planning and Requirements Specification outside of Team Foundation

Requirements Engineering – Checklists.xlsx

Zip File containing: o Use case

templates.doc o Detailed Business

Reqmts Template.doc o Deployment Reqts

template.dot o Non-Functional

Requirements Template.doc

o Generic Interview Template.doc

o Requirements Management Strategy – Template.docx