Underlying Principles of Needs Analysis
The following list gives the principles of needs analysis as originally defined.
- User’s need based requirements are complex and can conflict
- User’s need based requirements build a bridge from the business case to the design
- User’s need based requirements help to identify trade-offs that need to happen in the design process (i.e. where a design cannot resolve the user’s need based requirement conflicts)
- User’s need based requirements are there to unify the multi-disciplinary design team; enabling them to meet their business case.
- Formulate and ask questions to do with the business plan that provide an indication of the human aspects of the system, including the relative merit of functionality.
- Always express these findings from the user’s perspective.
- Cross-relate these requirements to each other and to the impactors on the activity.
- Allocate sufficient time during the development process to check and validate your user’s need based requirements.
- Ensure that all user’s need based requirements are derived as low level user requirements before being transposed into system requirements.
- Word your requirements precisely and ensure that you cover all categories of human-related requirements.
- Create test statements to validate the user’s need based requirements, the concept and the implementation
- Prior to freezing your design, validate your user’s need based requirements with users
- Accept that there still may be contradictory requirements
- Understand the nuances of the requirements and ensure that these are reflected in the precise wording of the requirements
- Keep asking your users until you have a true understanding of their requirements
- Elegant design can only be created from understanding the nuances of the requirements
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