How do you keep requirements on track?

Definite the process workflow prior to engaging in detailed requirements gathering. JIRA and Confluence are helpful. Verify your work with senior management, sponsors, and other project stakeholders in the early stages especially.

I think maintaining requirements is often more challenging than eliciting them. One of the important aspect of requirement management is validating and verifying requirements with different stakeholders on regular basis. Continuous validation and verification help minimize gaps. For instance, as a business analyst, I validate requirements at various stages: gathering, document preparation, design, and development. At every stage, your requirements are purified better by the stakeholders. This ongoing process ensures alignment with stakeholders' needs, particularly when clients are not sure about what they want. As a result this process helps business analysts ensure that they are on the right track and are working on the right requirements.

I look at this as the BAs responsibility to work with the QA team on test scripts, the full end-to-end testing process, UAT verification, etc. The BA has to be a critical liaison with the QA/UAT/testing teams to be successful.

Sometimes it's necessary to use multiple techniques, as there can be multiple test scenarios for the same endpoint. Therefore having a versatile skillset where you can adapt to new functionalities and concepts is a big bonus as a BA. Knowing a variety of skills will make the multi-step verification process more seamless for you as a BA in your work and just even your overall approach/thinking.

I use a couple of methods: I create a workflow diagram to document the current and to be processes or I build a MVP with the data I am transforming. The more visual requirements are the easier they are to understand, validate, and verify.

As a rule of thumb, always get sign off on verification/validation documents. Whether that’s through a predetermined formal process, or at least email sign off.

I believe this to be unique to each individual. For some this might be totally superfluous, for others it might be necessary to just have as a self-verification “mock check”.

Product Backlog is an evolving document where all the requirements in the form of epics/features/user stories are dumped. Hence this long list has to be maintained accurately. Some of the ways to simplify this using JIRA and Confluence are: - Separate out a feature, epic and a user story. - Prepare a requirement document which will consist of a high-level description of each feature along with designs. - A feature should be broken down into multiple user stories based on different functions that a user might perform. - Each user story should be verified in terms of its acceptance criteria that will cover all the elements and user journeys needed to be built. - Every user story should be tagged appropriately to its feature and then its epic.

Communication between the business analyst and stakeholders is very essential in ensuring the success of a project. It is important that there is a central location where the Requirements documents is stored and accessible to all the stakeholders.