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In continuation to my previous post , I’ll add some more techniques which can be used for information gathering.  Prototyping:   Prototyping allows to gather information by faking the production environment. In this technique, quite a lot of tools can be used to collect information, such as software programs to monitor/record mouse clicks or keystrokes, camera to monitor visual activity, etc.  Basically, what type of tool should be used is solely depend upon what type of information you want to collect. The cost of prototyping might be high because information gathered from this approach can be easily validated with a reason that prototyping is experimental rather than the responses received from users.  Note : Prototyping is preferred in the scenarios where it is impossible to shadow a person. Prototype can help you to get below sort of information:  Use of technologies, tools and applications.  Verification of workflow.  Cu...

In continuation to my previous post, I’ll add some more techniques which are popularly used for information gathering. Interviewing : While on one hand shadowing provides an effective means to discover what is currently being done in the business, but on the other hand it does not provide all the necessary information. Another flaw of shadowing would be, it is not suitable for getting information about long-term activities that extent weeks or months along with the processes that requires very less or no human intervention. Hence, we can look for other techniques like interviewing. Interviewing someone is the one-on-one meeting between project team and the user. Here quality of information totally depends upon interviewee and the interviewer. The interviewer can ask a wide range of questions as compared to shadowing mechanism. These questions can be from basic information to difficulties to limitations of the system. During the interview process, the interviewee can give some i...

This time rather than writing on some technology or solution, I thought to write on one of the important phases of SDLC which is nothing but requirement gathering. To be more specific, this article will be more about collecting information about business requirement. What are the various sources to get and understand most of the portions of any business requirement. It’ very important to understand that, information can be gathered from many standpoints. It can be from Business front, Application front, Operations front, Technology front , and may be many more. So, while gathering information, one should have a clear vision on what kind of information they are looking for. Let’s have a look at few of the well-known categories: B usiness – Goal of business, Service offerings, Products, Financial Structure, etc. Application – Productivity tools, interaction with business application system, Code Modules, etc. Operations – Identify the information’s origin, information’s consump...