Project Step 2:  Requirements Analysis Report

The real value of this is to establish and understand the details of your users and get you thinking about what matters. The requirements you come up with here will be used to guide your design and evaluate your implementation. This is NOT the part of the process where you should be limiting yourself because you feel you cannot create a solution that meets the requirements, but you should indicate any early concerns you might have about being able to create a solution.  Any reflections you have at this early stage are valuable – so please include them in your report -- such as reformulation of the project in light of getting to know your users.

The report should contain:

• Root concept:  the problem your team is investigating. The report should expand on the topic elaborating any particular focus that you have settled on.
• Requirements Analysis Process:
  • How many users did you work with?  Where/how did you find them?
  • What types of data did you collect?
  • How many person hours did you spend on this?  How long working with users?
• Users:
  • What are your categories of users?  What are their attributes? 
  • What is unexpected about them?
• Problem Scenarios:
  • What are scenarios of their current tasks?  Be sure to include the different aspects of scenarios such as the user's goals and mental experiences, not just actions, see Chapter 1.
  • List the artifacts.
• Claims:
  • What interesting claims can you make?  Be sure to include pros and cons.
• Other representations:  Use whatever additional representations you think will help communicate the current situations. These might include hierarchical task analysis, documentation of artifacts, snippets of actual conversations, etc.

Grading: is based on the depth of your reporting of getting to know your users and the completeness of scenarios. One measure of quality of evaluation is the number of positive and negative aspects you claim. However, the most important measure is how well you come to see the situation and the particular details of the activities.