Many formal techniques are used to gather requirements from stakeholders. Before we go into the formal techniques, I would advise the BA to be prepared and disciplined.

• You must know your stakeholders and their roles in the project
• You must know what requirements you are going to gather
• You should write your questions before
• You should know the key business terminology of your stakeholders
• You should conduct some web research on the topic or business process before meeting the stakeholders

If above points are taken care of, let’s now go and elicit the requirements.

1. The meeting is scheduled and you introduce yourself to the stakeholders and they also do the same
2. You should first discuss and decide on requirement gathering approach. You start the topic and let the conversation begin. You need to provide your input on various approaches and their pros and cons. You can suggest a mixed approach also, e.g. interview, document analysis, questionnaire techniques etc.
3. Now you start gathering the requirements step by step
4. Let’s know the vision, objective and reason for the project
5. What are the challenges they are facing in the current situation
6. What should change
7. Why the change is required now
8. How will the new software or system will help
9. Where does the software fit in within the enterprise landscape
10. What are the risks they foresee
11. What are the dependencies and assumptions
12. What is the expected and ideal future landscape

Now we have to get into the current and future landscape.

After that we will discuss on users, teams, security aspects.

Let’s get functional.

Let’s understand non functional.

Will update this post.