Requirements Engineering

A solid understanding of requirements is an inescapable and important part at the beginning of software development. We can help you better discover and understand what it is you need to build so that you can better spend your time building it.

We provide three services regarding user requirements engineering that build on top of each other:

Requirements Elicitation

Why This Is Important

In order to define requirements it’s crucial to gather the right input from the right stakeholders. Only if the sum of technical requirements, business requirements and user requirements is concise and unambiguous will the requirements specification ensure that the product being developed matches the actual needs of those who will later use it.

Our Offering

We apply methods and techniques from the social sciences (e.g. focused interviews, ethnographic field studies) to gather requirements from the various stakeholders. Crucially important is the effective encounter with target users to learn firsthand about their perspective. What are their pain points with legacy systems? What additional functionality would help them? What does a perfect work flow look like from a user perspective? After having formulated and documented the requirements we review them together with you for validation.

Functional Modeling

Why This Is Important

Anticipating the fundamental functioning and behavior of the future product allows checking the match between requirements and solution. Also, function models allow to start defining the elementary UI properties like information architecture, layout and navigation.

Our Offering

With your input on business requirements and technical requirements we aggregate user requirements into a functional model. This abstract embodiment of the future product is represented from a user’s perspective. The model allows understanding, communicating and validating the product as a whole without specifying design details.

Use Case Development

Why This Is Important

Use cases specify the details of the user-computer interaction that functional models leave out. They ensure the smooth transition of the project from analysis to design by informing the UX designers about what needs to happen on the UI during key work flows.

Our Offering

With functional models as a foundation, we translate requirements into use cases. We specify the concrete user inputs and system outputs for key work flows together with other relevant use case elements such as actors, triggers, alternate paths and the pre- and post-conditions.