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Why?

Get a detailed view of how users will be using your solution and what their requirements are.

How?

Talk to your clients about their expectations and describe how the different users (or stakeholders) will interact with the system under development. It is highly recommended that you directly involve end users, rather than just the client.

Ingredients

• The involvement of a group of stakeholders that includes people beyond the client.
• Tools to capture the scenarios described, like use cases and user stories.
• A focus on expected system behaviour, not its realisation.
• Use the stakeholders’ ‘language’ so they can review the described scenarios.

In practice

Users and stakeholders often find it difficult to describe the expected behaviour of the system from scratch. Therefore, most companies take an iterative approach to defining user requirements (e.g. by updating the scenarios after each demo with stakeholders).

Phase(s) of use

In the following project phase(s) explore user requirements can be used:

• Analysis