Tool Mentor: Eliciting Stakeholder Requests Using Rational RequisitePro
Purpose
The purpose of eliciting stakeholder requests is to gather input from any person
or representative of an organization who has a stake, or a vested interest,
in the outcome of the project. Stakeholders
might be end users, maintainers of the proposed system, shareholders, technical
support representatives, or others.
This section provides links to additional information related to this tool mentor.
Overview
Stakeholder requests for
a proposed system can be gathered through a variety of elicitation techniques,
including interviews, questionnaires,
requirements workshops, role
playing, and so on. (See the Gather Information step in Activity:
Elicit Stakeholder Requests for a complete list.)
Whichever elicitation technique you use, you should record your results in
one central location, such as a Rational ClearQuest® database or a RequisitePro
requirements document, in order to reference them when defining business and
system needs. (For information on integrating ClearQuest and RequisitePro, refer
to Managing Stakeholder
Requests Using Rational ClearQuest and Rational RequisitePro.) You may choose
to include your elicitation documents with the RequisitePro project that contains
your system requirements, or you can create a separate RequisitePro project
just for elicitation documents and then use cross-project traceability to link
your elicitation results to the system requirements RequisitePro project.
The techniques you use to gather stakeholder requests may differ from project
to project, depending on your developers' and customers' knowledge of the system's
domain and proposed functionality. As a starting point, RequisitePro provides
a sample Stakeholder Requests outline and a predefined requirement
type (STRQ: Stakeholder Request) to help you collect stakeholder requests.
You should modify the provided Stakeholder Requests outline and create additional
RequisitePro outlines, as needed, in order to gather additional input. You may
want to create a RequisitePro outline to gather results for each elicitation
technique: one for questionnaire results, one for storyboarding results, and
so on, or you may choose to record these results in one document.
Tool Steps
Because stakeholder requests elicitation may vary for each project, we offer
instructions for modifying the existing RequisitePro Stakeholder Requests outline
or creating a completely new outline to meet your project needs. Begin by working
with the existing Stakeholder Requests outline.
- Add
the Stakeholder Requests document type to your project
- Modify the
Stakeholder Requests outline
- Create a Stakeholder
Requests document
- Create
requirements in the Stakeholder Requests document (optional)
To use the Stakeholder Requests template provided in RequisitePro, you must
add the Stakeholder Requests document type to your project.
Note: To check whether your project already includes the Stakeholder
Request Document Type, select the project in the Explorer, and then click File
> Properties, Document Types tab. If that document type is listed,
you can skip to procedure 3. Create
a Stakeholder Requests document.
To add the Stakeholder Requests document type to an open RequisitePro project:
- Click File > Properties. The Project Properties dialog box appears.
- Click the Document Types tab and click Add. The Document Type
dialog box appears.
- Type a document name, description, and file extension. The file extension
is applied to all documents associated with the document type.
- In the Default Requirement Type list, select "Stakeholder Request
Requirement Type." If it is not listed, click the adjacent New
button; in the Requirement Type dialog box, type "Request Requirement
Type" in the Name field, complete the remaining fields, and click
OK to return to the Document Type dialog box.
- In the Outline Name list, select the "RUP Stakeholder Requests"
outline.
- Click OK to close the Document Type dialog box.
- Click OK to close the Project Properties dialog box.
For More Information
Refer to the topic
titled Creating and modifying document types (Index: document types >
creating) in the RequisitePro online Help.
You can customize the RequisitePro Stakeholder Requests outline for specific
aspects of your project. Modify the RUP_stkreq.dot
outline in Microsoft® Word (independent of RequisitePro). You can then use
your customized outline to create a new Stakeholder Requests document.
To modify the provided Stakeholder Requests outline:
- Create a copy of the Word template file "RUP_stkreq.dot,"
located in the Outlines directory in your RequisitePro installation. (This
step preserves the original outline for future use.) Name the copy to identify
it as the original file (for example, "Stakeholder_orig.dot").
- Open the template file "RUP_stkreq.dot"
in Word (independent of RequisitePro).
- Modify this file so that it is specific to your project.
- Click File > Save and File > Close.
Note: RequisitePro must be closed when you make this
modification.
Create a Stakeholder Requests document in your RequisitePro project, based
on the modified Stakeholder Requests outline.
To create a Stakeholder Requests document:
- In the Explorer, select the package in which you want the new document to
reside. Then click File > New > Document. The Document Properties
dialog appears.
- In the Name field, type "Stakeholder Requests" or another
name to identify the document. (This will be the way you refer to this document
in RequisitePro.)
- In the Description field, type a short description for the document.
- In the Filename field, type a file name that RequisitePro will use
when saving the document.
- Select the document type you added in procedure 1 (Add
the stakeholder requests document type to your project), which was
based on the RUP Stakeholder Requests outline. Click OK.
- In the newly created Stakeholder Requests document, record the results of
the interview process. You may choose to create multiple interview documents
or combine results in one document. We encourage you to document the responses
of each type of stakeholder you interviewed to ensure that a wide spectrum
of stakeholders is represented in that process.
- Click RequisitePro > Document > Save.
For More Information
Refer to the topic titled
Creating requirements documents (Index: documents > creating) in the
RequisitePro online Help.
The Stakeholder Requests document does not contain requirements
per se. However, you may want to set traceability
links between stakeholder requests (identified in the Stakeholder Requests document)
and product features (identified in the Vision
document). A change in stakeholder requests might affect the definition of one
or more product features. By recording the dependencies between the two, you
will be able to make careful and informed decisions when you prioritize
use cases. By marking stakeholder requests as requirements, you can also
use them in traceability links. (See Activity:
Manage Dependencies.)
To create requirements from stakeholder requests, follow these steps:
- In the Stakeholder Requests document, select the text of the requirement.
- Do one of the following:
- Right-click and select New Requirement.
- Click RequisitePro > Requirement
> New.
The Requirement Properties dialog box appears.
- Select STRQ as the requirement type. Click the Attributes
tab to modify the attribute values.
- Click OK.
For More Information
Refer to the topic Creating
requirements in a document (Index: requirements > creating) in the RequisitePro
online Help.
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