Leveraging Front-End Analysis as a Requirements Elicitation Technique.

havesomecheesefrie
Apr 17, 2023
2 min read

Updated: Jan 26

Introduction

Front-end analysis is a valuable technique for understanding the needs and expectations of users when interacting with a system. By analyzing the front end of any system, you can gather crucial business requirements that help you design a more user-friendly and efficient solution. In this guide, we'll explain how to gather business requirements by analyzing the front end of a system and the types of requirements you can gather using this method.

Problem Statement

To understand concepts better, let's take an example of a customer onboarding system for a telecom giant - SpaceTel. Assume that you're the BA leading a re-write project where SpaceTel's legacy origination system, that is written in a programming language and framework form the 1990s, is no longer fitting today's use cases and SpaceTel has decided to re-write they system in a newer framework reserving its core functionality.

Getting Started

Step-1 Begin by defining the scope and objectives of your analysis. Determine the purpose of the system and the expected outcomes. In our case, we're dealing with an onboarding system. By nature, it is meant to capture data required to onboard a customer and pass on to a database or other downstream applications.

Step-2 Identify the personas who interact with the system and the system's technical and business owners. Persona identification is important as you may have users with various levels of access to the features of the system. For example, a sales associate may not have access to provide discounts to a customer, but the store manager may have that. In our case,

Step-3 Assuming that you have access to a sandbox or testing environment where the legacy system is installed, now it's the time to go view by view, screen by screen in the legacy system and note down all the data elements that you see on each screen. Below are some sample screens: