Elicitation and Gathering of Requirements - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 45

2. Process documentation—Organizational process documentation would usu-
ally consist of processes, procedures, standards, guidelines, SOPs (Standard
Operating Procedures) with processes at the highest level in each category.
Studying these documents would give us a complete idea about the organiza-
tional functioning and how the business processes would be performed by
individuals designated for each process. When an organization has a well
documented process which is followed scrupulously in the organization, the
need to conduct personal interviews would be minimized. They provide almost
all the information necessary to finalize the requirements.
3. Standards, and guidelines—Standards and guidelines certainly form part of
process documentation but deserve a special mention because they mandate
how business processes are to be performed in the organization without
exceptions. Standards, and guidelines give us the idea about the business
processes of the organization and would give detailed steps in each of the
processes. This information gives us the details about the processes associated
with input, output and associative processes. We may need a supplemental
input to the information contained in other process documents to finalize
requirements but standards and guidelines are usually self-contained.
4. Customer satisfaction surveys—These form part of organizational records but
deserve special mention as they may bring out inefficiencies inherent in the
process. The information contained in these records may be used to enquire if
any

process changes are necessary before the process is computerized/

upgraded.
5. Customer complaints—Often, customers of an organization do not wait to
voice their complaints till they receive a customer satisfaction survey format.
While most of this information could be found in the customer satisfaction
surveys, there may still be additional records of customer complaints. These
also give us information about the possible improvements in the system which
can perhaps be implemented in the proposed system.
6. Publications/reports/case studies—on any given subject, we do have many
topics, best practices reports, experience reports and so on produced by experts/
industry associations/consultancy organizations available for study. For
example, we now have a host of reports on the implementation experience of
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) which are very helpful in finalizing
requirements of a proposed ERP implementation project. Similarly there are
organizations such as Gartner Group, Forrester Research, Technology Evalu-
ation Centers which bring out study reports which are very helpful, for final-
izing requirements, especially in product development scenarios.

Thus to reiterate what was stated at the beginning of this section, gathering
requirements is collecting information from secondary sources such as documents.