Tool Mentor:  Eliciting Stakeholder Requests Using Rational RequisitePro

Purpose

The purpose of eliciting stakeholder requests is to gather input from any person or representative of an organization who has a stake—a vested interest—in the outcome of the project. Stakeholders might be end users, maintainers of the proposed system, shareholders, technical support representatives, or others.

Related Rational Unified Process™ (RUP) information: Activity: Elicit Stakeholder Requests.

Overview

Stakeholder Requests for a proposed system can be gathered through a variety of elicitation techniques, including interviews, questionnaires, requirements workshops, role playing, and so on. (See the Gather Information step in the Elicit Stakeholder Requests activity for a complete list.) Whichever elicitation technique you use, you should record your results in one central location, such as a Rational RequisitePro project, in order to reference them when defining business and system needs. You may choose to include your elicitation documents with the RequisitePro project that contains your system requirements, or you can create a separate RequisitePro project just for elicitation documents and then use cross-project traceability to link your elicitation results to the system requirements RequisitePro project.

The techniques you use to gather stakeholder requests may differ from project to project, depending on your developers' and customers' knowledge of the system's domain and proposed functionality. As a starting point, RequisitePro provides a sample Stakeholder Requests outline and a predefined requirement type (STRQ—Stakeholder Requests) to help you collect stakeholder requests. You should modify the provided Stakeholder Requests outline and create additional RequisitePro outlines, as needed, in order to gather additional input. You may want to create a RequisitePro outline to gather results for each elicitation technique: one for questionnaire results, one for storyboarding results, and so on, or you may choose to record these results in one document.

Tool Steps

Because stakeholder requests elicitation may vary for each project, we offer instructions for modifying the existing RequisitePro Stakeholder Requests outline or creating a completely new outline to meet your project needs. Begin by working with the existing Stakeholder Requests outline.

1. Add the Stakeholder Requests document type to your project
2. Modify the provided Stakeholder Requests template
3. Create a Stakeholder Requests document
4. Create requirements in the Stakeholder Requests document

1.  Add the Stakeholder Requests document type to your project 

To use the Stakeholder Requests template provided in RequisitePro, you must add the Stakeholder Requests document type to your project.

Note: If your project already includes the Stakeholder Request Document Type, you can skip to procedure 3. Create a Stakeholder Requests document.

To add the Stakeholder Requests document type to an open RequisitePro project:

1. On the Tool Palette, click Project > Properties. The Project Properties dialog box appears.
2. Click the Document Types tab and click Add. The Document Type dialog box appears.
3. Type a document name, description, and file extension. The file extension is applied to all documents associated with the document type.
4. Select the "Stakeholder Request Requirement Type" in the list.
5. From the Outline Name drop-down menu, select the "RUP Stakeholder Requests" outline.
6. Click OK to close the Document Type dialog box.
7. Click OK to close the Project Properties dialog box.

For More Information

Refer to the topic titled Creating and modifying document types (Index: document types > creating) in the RequisitePro online Help.

2.  Modify the Stakeholder Requests outline

You can customize the RequisitePro Stakeholder Requests outline for specific aspects of your project. Modify the RUP_stkreq.dot outline in Microsoft Word (independent of RequisitePro). You can then use your customized outline to create a new Stakeholder Requests document.

To modify the provided Stakeholder Requests outline:

1. Create a copy of the Word template file "RUP_stkreq.dot," located in the Outlines directory in your RequisitePro installation. (This step preserves the original outline for future use.) Name the copy to identify it as the original file (for example, "Stakeholder_orig.dot").
2. Open the template file "RUP_stkreq.dot" in Microsoft Word (independent of RequisitePro).
3. Modify this file so that it is specific to your project.
4. Click File > Save and File > Close.
   Note: RequisitePro must be closed when you make this modification.

3.  Create a Stakeholder Requests document

Create a Stakeholder Requests document in your RequisitePro project, based on the modified Stakeholder Requests outline.

To create a Stakeholder Requests document:

1. On the Tool Palette, select Document > New. The Document Properties dialog appears.
2. In the Name field, type "Stakeholder Requests" or another name to identify the document. (This will be the way you refer to this document in RequisitePro.)
3. In the Description field, type a short description for the document.
4. In the Filename field, type a file name that RequisitePro will use when saving the document to disk.
5. Select the document type you added in procedure 1,  which was based on the RUP® Stakeholder Requests outline. Click OK.
6. In the newly created Stakeholder Requests document, record the results of the interview process. You may choose to create multiple interview documents or combine results in one document. We encourage you to document the responses of each type of stakeholder you interviewed to ensure that a wide spectrum of stakeholders is represented in that process.
7. In the Word Workplace, click RequisitePro > Document > Save.

For More Information

Refer to the topic titled Creating requirements documents (Index: documents > creating) in the RequisitePro online Help.

4.   Create requirements in the Stakeholder Requests document

The Stakeholder Requests document does not contain requirements per se. However, you may want to set traceability links between stakeholder requests (identified in the Stakeholder Requests document) and product features (identified in the Vision document). A change in stakeholder requests might affect the definition of one or more product features. By recording the dependencies between the two, you will be able to make careful and informed decisions when you prioritize use cases. By marking stakeholder requests as requirements, you can also use them in traceability links. (See Activity: Manage Dependencies.)

To create requirements from stakeholder requests, follow these steps:

1. In the Stakeholder Requests document, select the text of the requirement.
2. In the Word Workplace, do one of the following:
   • Right-click and select Create Requirement.
   • Click RequisitePro > Requirement > Create.
     The Requirement Properties dialog box appears.
3. Select STRQ as the requirement type. Click the Attributes tab to modify the attribute values.
4. Click OK.

For More Information

Refer to the topic titled Creating requirements in a document (Index: requirements > creating > ...in a document) in the RequisitePro online Help.

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