Product Owner is the accountability in Scrum which Maximizes the value to the stakeholders using the bandwidth available to him/her via the Developers.
While the requirements can never be finalized in empirical work, one of the fundamental aspects of reducing wastage in Agile is to get the requirements ready for the developers “just in time” – not to early and not too late.
Product Owner’s role is to engage with the stakeholders and understand their needs and expectations. This involves
- Requirement elicitation techniques
- Need Analysis techniques
- Requirements classification techniques
- Collaborative Gaming techniques
- Requirements classification techniques
- Requirement Documentation techniques
Who does requirement elicitation in Scrum?
While the Product Owner remains accountable for requirements elicitation, rarely would a Product Owner have enough time to elicit it by himself/herself. Generally, Business Analyst does this (Business Analyst is called as Developer in Scrum) for the Product Owner. Elicitation techniques help people to understand the thoughts and feelings of participants, and to probe for more information.
Why is requirements elicitation different in Scrum?
In Scrum, requirement elicitation is an ongoing job. The Product Backlog emerges throughout the project. Therefore, doing too much of upfront elicitation is a lot of wastage. However, doing the requirements elicitation should ensure that the process is quick, and bureaucracy involved with signoffs and baselines should be avoided. At the same time, the process has to be fast. You cannot have huge documentations done in the form of a Functional Specification or Business Requirements Specification.
Requirements Elicitation Techniques
- Brainstorming technique
- Focus Groups
- Interviews
- Prototypes, simulations, demonstrations
- Wireframes
- Nominal group techniques
- Voting techniques
- User story splitting
Requirements Classification Techniques
- Idea / Mind mapping
- Affinity Diagrams
- Multi-criteria decision analysis
- Wideband Delphi
Collaborative Gaming Techniques
- Remember the future
- Prune the product tree
- Sailboat technique
User Role Modeling Techniques
- User Proxies
- User Persona
- Extreme Persona
Need Analysis Techniques
- Five Why techniques
- Cause and effect diagram
- Cause and effect matrix
- SWOT analysis
- Value Stream Mapping
Process Flow Techniques
- Process flow diagram
- User Cases
- Spaghetti diagram
- Swimlane flowchart
- SIPOC diagram
Requirements Documentation Techniques
- User Story
- Context Diagram
- Use Case Diagrams
Business Rules Formats
- Business Rules Catalogue
- Decision Trees
Data Formats
- Entity Relationship Diagrams
- Data Flow Diagrams
- Data Dictionary
- State Table and State Diagrams
Interface Formats
- Report Table
- System Interface Table
- User Interface Flow diagram