The idea of a “requirements workbench” is one that the guys over at Requirements.net have been consistently socializing over the past few months, and one that I have been following with interest.

Requirements.net has recently posted a Business Analyst Workbench Whitepaper and a Workbench Buyer’s Guide. To give the general gist of the workbench without stealing Req.net’s thunder, the workbench concept includes requirements management capabilities, but then goes beyond that to support the analyst through elicitation, elaboration and communication and validation activities.

My company has been looking at requirements management solutions, which has provided me with the unique opportunity to play the “user” role for a change, and to do a little research into the attributes that make requirements management successful.

Anyway, what I’d like to do with this post is to share a few items I’ve found on the Web as well as some of my own thoughts on what might be of use to others who might be looking for a requirements management solution.

What would you think of a tool that could turn natural language into software code? Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Well, there is already such a tool in the works, although it’ll probably still be a while before they’ve ironed out all the wrinkles.

A few notes and impressions from the February, 2008 Atlanta IIBA chapter meeting.

Welcome! This site specializes in providing tips and tools for Business Analysts and systems development in general. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you’d prefer, you can also receive my posts directly to your e-mail. Thanks for visiting!Recently, I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in some very interesting training sessions relating to business process re-engineering, and UML modeling. Now, I have long understood the value of use cases, but have never fully leveraged them or taken advantage of some of the added …

There are currently a host of Content Management System (CMS) packages available. You can spend a fortune on purchasing a system and having it installed professionally, or you can go the open source route and do it yourself at little to no cost.

The best way to decide which package you want is to determine what you need it to do. Once you’ve established your business requirements, you may also want to find out what other “bells and whistles” are typically available in a CMS package.

Ok, so a lot of folks nowadays will type their meeting notes directly into their laptops, and that’s not a bad thing. It certainly saves time.
However, there are situations where the old pen and paper is not a bad thing. I, for example, am still a traditional pen-and-paper note taker. Much like in college, I find that I retain things better in my memory if I jot them down, and then enter them electronically into a more “official” format.
Also, if, Heaven forbid, I should lose my electronic copy, I like …