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Hi I am building a small app to get used to Meteor (and Mongo). Something that is bothering me is the data modelling aspect. Specifically what is the best way to model a many to many relationship. I have read in the Mongo docs that a doc should not be embedded in another doc if you expect it to grow while the original doc remains fairly static.
In my test app students can register for courses. So from the Mongo perspective it makes sense to include the students as an embedded doc in the course as each course will have a limited number of students as opposed to the other way round where, over time, a student could theoretically join unlimited courses.
Then there is the Meteor aspect, I read that a lot of Meteor's features are aimed at separate collections, such as DDP working at the document level so any change in the student array would cause the entire course doc to be resent to every browser, and things like the each spacebars helper works with Mongo cursors but not with arrays etc, etc.
Has anyone dealt with a similar situation and could they explain what approach they took and any drawbacks they had to deal with etc? Thanks.
See this article: https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/reactive-joins-in-meteor/
And test how good your possible solutions are with this https://kadira.io/
Better use the guide:
http://guide.meteor.com/data-loading.html#publishing-relations
The Meteor team tames (or hides!) the javascript monster to an amazing extent. By using their conventions, you get "free" a ton of much-used functionality "out of the box". Things that are usually re-invented over and over again, accounts, OAuth, live data across clients, standard live-data protocol etc.
But very soon... you need features not in the box. Wow... look at all the choices. Wait a minute, this is the same monster you were fighting before Meteor!
So use the official Meteor Guide. They recommend the wisest ways to extend functionality of your app when you make these choices.
Since they know how they have "hidden the monster", they know how to keep avoiding the monster when you extend.
It's most asked question in IT job interview so I want to know what should the way that I explain the answer of this type of question asked to me.
"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. But, No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man"
The simple meaning of new technology is to make work or effort simpler or make it easy.
Not just technology but everything that may changes you update yourself with it.
To keep updated with technology you need to use technology, specially latest enhanced technology.
The concept is: by doing so (using technology) it will become obligatory for you to keep track of any new or emerging technologies through reading, searching etc.
I am not claiming that this is something you should do. Its one of the way what you try to do to make yourself updated to some extend with the pace of technology change.
you should go and subscribe yourself to various RSS feeds, go frequently to some great sites (dzone, javalobby etc.) and look for blogs/articles which deserves a read.
Things which you don’t know in this case deserves more read and i start googling stuff to get more details.
see, technology products will not succeed if they are developed for their own sake, nor simply to help users complete a specific task. Technology products succeed when they are incorporated by users into their daily lives in ways that serve their fundamental needs as people - fundamental needs such as relating to others and keeping in touch, even when they are miles apart.
The truth is nobody fully understands knows how today’s technology might be used tomorrow. If the recent past is anything to go by it’s likely that people will certainly find innovative and as yet unthought-of ways to communicate and keep in touch.
Thanks,...!!!
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I would like to know what are the main tools in the market for analysing/implementing E-customer behaviour in a Web application.
I just know Google Analytics which tracks client-side activity but maybe there are many alternatives using client and server-side scripts.
I already posted this question on webmasters.stackexchange.com E-customer behaviour in a Web application, but it has been closed and cannot understand why!
There are a vast array of tools to analyse user behaviour on a website. Ecommerce or otherwise.
Google analytics has options like:
Ecommerce
Ecommerce custom variables
Goals & Funnels
Goal flows
etc. which are useful in understanding things like drop off points, conversion rates, typical customer path and other shopper metrics.
Other analytics packages useful for ecommerce / website behaviour:
Clicktale
Crazy egg
Getclicky
and more. Some of these have a live / spy feature that allows you to see what users are doing realtime.
And the best way is to actually watch a recording of your users behaviour complete with keystrokes and mouse clicks / movements.
User recording tools:
MouseStats
Ghostrec
Inspectlet
Mouseflow
Most of the above also do aggregated heatmaps and overlays to give you an insight into what users click most or what catches their eye etc.
Incremental improvement to your website:
A/B testing or multi-variate testing are all the rage now. With A/B testing be aware of local maximum and also avoid the common mistakes people make with testing. Google content expirements (formerly known as google website optimizer) now is part of Google Analytics and you can use this to do testing.
References / more reading for analysing and setting up ecommerce user behaviour:
Stalking Users
Driving online sales
Web Analytics Solution
First of all you need to choose a general propose Web Analytics Solution. Since you are an E-commerce you want to choose one that has good support for tracking E-commerce data.
Google Analytics is the obvious choice here not only because it's free but also because it's better documented and easier to implement.
depending on your size it may make sense to implement a more Enterprise level Ecommerce solution. You may want to take a look at Adobe Omniture and IBM CoreMetrics. They are much more expensive not only because of the licenses but on an implementation perspective. It may take months to implement one of these other tools and the cost of the implementation can be almost the same as the costs for the licenses. Still if you need more enterprise level analysis and integrations with other BI solutions it may be worth taking a look at these.
Note that Google Analytics also has a Premium Edition. This is a fairly new alternative and provide some extra features and early access to beta features.
Product Recommendation
Depending on your Ecommerce platform you might already have some kind of product recommendation or up-selling. You usually can improve these systems based on analytics data. There are just a few options on the market, and most companies doing this tend to develop their own recommendation engine.
If you're just getting started with it, it might be worth looking at LiftSuggest. I haven't tried it but they seem easy enough to implement and leverage Google Analytics data to improve cross-selling.
HeatMap
It's easy enough to implement and may provide some nice isights. I find them more distracting usually but every now and then you can make good use of them. The most common seen around are CrazyEgg and ClickTale.
Behavioral Targeting
This is a technique to customize your site based on a previous knowledge you have about the visitor in order to increase his conversion rate. Tools don't help you much here, since you have to customize your site and no tool can predict how to do that. One common approach is to create buckets depending on factors that you can infer. For example: Users with Internet Explorer might be less tech savvy and thus might be more interested in non-tech products. On the other side Linux users are probably on the technology field. So you can put users on buckets depending on which country they came from, which browser they're using or if they are logged in you can use the information they entered on their profile or based on previous purchases. One tool that helps you doing that is called BTBuckets.
A/B and Multivariate Testing
Google analytics has an A/B testing tool integrated with the tool. Another Good tool that provides both A/B and Multivariate testing are Unbounce, Optimizely and Webtrends Optimize.
Custom Solution
Everybody these days are developing custom solutions. If you still have money and time to spend on Web Analytics after you exausted the other options you can look into building your own. Collecting the data the way you want and analyzing the granular data. Here solutions range fro server side to client side collection, but for the analysis they are usually done with Hadoop or with a OLAP Business Intelligence Tool like Microstrategy.
What you're looking for is a called Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM. They vary greatly, so without an in-depth understanding of your exact needs it's impossible to recommend specific ones. Any good CRM will let you analyze your site visitors in various ways. For example, you can see if customers bought X, they often came back and bought Y one month later.
The difficult part is integration because these systems need information about orders and other user actions. If you're using an off-the-shelf e-commerce package, there are often CRM options readily available.
For a "lighter" system you can use Google Analytics or similar, since it lets you send tracking, conversion, and sales information from the browser. It's great for analyzing the overall success of the site and tracking user actions across pages, but less powerful for sales-specific reporting and analysis.
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You can't just have user stories somehow the functionality of the program has to be documented. Do you end up with a specifications document with scrum? If you do do you end up assigning time to do this onto the task?
An example would be a complex workflow.
Another example would be a new member who comes onto the team.
There will be plenty of good ideas added to this question. My personal experience has taught me that:
1~ The working product is a form of documentation itself: assuming the product is accepted, then asking what it should do under certain condition is equivalent to asking what does it actually do under those conditions - log in and try it to get your answer.
2~ The tests, be them manual or automated (or a mix), are a form of documentation. Certainly unit tests may be way too far from the domain language spoken by the less-technically inclined team members (eg: 'business Experts', or Customers). Acceptance tests may be closer to a 'middle ground' of sort. Definitely BDD-style tests seem to have the best chance to build a ubiquitous language everyone can understand (see in this regard Gojko's Bridging the Communication Gap). Nonetheless, all of these form of tests are a form of documentation which can be used to determine what the product should do.
3~ Depending on where your project falls on the spectrum, your documentation (and, in general, all your ancillary artifacts) may require a higher or lower degree of ceremony. Smaller products, smaller teams, where time to market is critical may find that a very formal documentation of requirement costs way too much compared to the value it adds. Extremely large projects, spanning multiple teams and years of development, on the other hand, will find the ROI of formal documentation quite different.
4~ In the perfect world, we probably wouldn't need to document requirements other than in the form of working code (which, in the ivory Tower would also be self-explanatory) and tests (mostly for regression testing, and -on the fringe- to drive development of new features). Thus, the question of requirements documentation is a question about what's different between the Perfect World/Ivory Tower and the Real World/Trenches. The answer, of course, is different on a case-by-case, depending on the project and the team. For instance, we could say "All requirements shall be kept into this wiki, and maintained with the utmost care, etc etc..." but if the team is not familiar and comfortable with wikis this would not work.
5~ In the end, the stakeholders are those you should ask. Certainly, the topic should be approached in a collaborative manner, because everyone on the team will have to interact with the requirements throughout the project, but you must find a form of documentation that satisfy the stakeholders' needs.
All that being said, here's some places I've seen requirements documented while applying Scrum (why do I feel like this word should always be followed by an asterisk?):
PDF document
Bulletin Boards
Wiki
Wiki + Automated Acceptance Tests (read: FitNesse)
Unit tests
Manual Test Plans
User Stories, Use Cases diagrams (read: Enterprise Architect models)
Whiteboards around the office
Emails
Post-it notes
And, to be honest, I cannot say that any one system has a consistently higher correlation with a successful project than the others. I guess, indeed, we don't have a silver bullet.
HTH, thanks for the thought-provoking question!
Adding "documentation" as a task on each user story could certainly go a long ways towards your goal.
Scrum says you should document what you need, when you need it; it doesnt say you shouldnt have documents.
So if a document is required either by the finished product (eg. help documentation) or to produce the finished product (eg. requirements documentation) then there should be a documentation task/user story in your product backlog.
Appropriate priority should then be placed for that task.
For documentation the key point is;
Document only what you need, only when you need it.
You can't just have user stories
somehow the functionality of the
program has to be documented. Do you
end up with a specifications document
with scrum? If you do do you end up
assigning time to do this onto the
task?
Why can't you just have user stories? What purpose do these specification documents serve? What value does the investment in producing these documents return? Does the benefit out weigh the cost? If not, then isn't the time spent creating, and more importantly maintaining, these documents waste?
I know I'm asking more questions than providing answers, but I think part of what Scrum and other Agile approaches like lean do is force you to re-examine your current practices and see if they still make sense.
In the case of specifications, who will be updating and maintaining these documents once the feature has launched? In most companies I've been at, the documentation has been sparse, out of date, or rarely referenced.
Instead, why not use executable tests or BDD so that the documentation becomes part of the code and is executable. For example, see Ben Mabey's talk on Cucumber
If for some reason, a specific type of document is required for legal compliance purposes, you can always add it to the teams' definition of "done", however, I've found in most cases, stories and tests are more than sufficient forms of documentation.
Maybe my understanding of the question is completely wrong, but I what I understood was that the OP was uncomfortable with the mismatch between user stories and requirements. With reason I'd say.
In my opinion, user stories tell how a chunk of functionality shall be demonstrated to the product owner. The language of the story can be something that can be understood by the product owner but mainly by the developers. You might have stories that describe things that are not even directly required by the owner, but are breakdowns of things that are.
Requirements in the other hand are a detailed specification in domain user's language of what the system needs to do in order to be valid. In many cases a requirements document is not optional (fixed price projects for example).
What I do is a mix of both. I have a requirements document, and in most of my scrum stories, I have something in my notes that link that story with one or more items of the requirements. It is as simple as "See FR-042 and FR-45" (FR for functional requirement for example)
I think you are asking for a few different things here. If you are adding a new team member, then the documentation for the system should be geared toward their role on the team as part of the on-boarding process.
If you are talking about documenting the system functionality; in our organization our training teams document the functionality as part of the release. They are engaged (as a stakeholder) during the Sprint Review (demo) and then provided a training environment with the new functionality to prepare the training materials prior to release.
If you are talking about providing documentation for tractability, your backlog can serve as that with the proper process & controls added.
Each one of these different items takes planning and deliberate process development to effectively function and meet the needs of the team. We have included each one of these items in our retrospectives as an issue was identified and then developed our processes over time.
In addition to what James Kolpack said, the user story map should persist after the project is finished as it too is a form of documentation. I believe we plan to some how convert it to a document that lives in our Wiki when all is said and done.
The idea is that this document will be useful for people who need to maintain the system or add enhancements to it in the future because they will have an understanding of the user's perspective.
I mostly agree with Todd, but there was times when part of my team's task was to produce documentation : Documentation was the user story itself our PO asked to be delivered.
In these cases we followed the following guidelines:
try as much as we can to extract documentation from actual working code (typically some document generation program that read internal data structures or configuration files used both for building the actual program and build documents).
define in the documentation US the goal of the documentation :
who the reader is supposed to be
what he should be able to achieve reading that document.
In my experience that makes documents easier to write and enable some kind of test (you ask to someone, typically PO, to read the doc and say if it's OK considering the goal).
You write documentations to validate your system. User stories serve the same purpose if written correctly in a format that reflects user interaction with the system. I will recommend using BDD and writing stories using Gherkin syntax. Eventually your scenarios become your acceptance criteria which helps in validation whether the system is working correctly or not.
We have a docs team that produce the "instruction manual" for our product. The manual is structured around the main features of the product, and the tasks that the user can perform in those features.
Each sprint, Scrum teams work on user stories that add functionality to the product features.
After sprint planning, the docs team meet with the Scrum team and see which user stories that will be developed this sprint. The docs team then start enhancing the instruction manual by writing the initial docs. During the sprint, the docs team follow the progress of the user stories, and can use the product as it's deployed to test environments. At the end of the sprint, the docs team finialise the updated instruction manual and add final screen shots etc...
The instruction manual ship as part of the release each sprint.
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How do you go about the requirements gathering phase? Does anyone have a good set of guidelines or tips to follow? What are some good questions to ask the stakeholders?
I am currently working on a new project and there are a lot of unknowns. I am in the process of coming up with a list of questions to ask the stakeholders. However I cant help but to feel that I am missing something or forgetting to ask a critical question.
You're almost certainly missing something. A lot of things, probably. Don't worry, it's ok. Even if you remembered everything and covered all the bases stakeholders aren't going to be able to give you very good, clear requirements without any point of reference. The best way to do this sort of thing is to get what you can from them now, then take that and give them something to react to. It can be a paper prototype, a mockup, version 0.1 of the software, whatever. Then they can start telling you what they really want.
See obligatory comic below...
In general, I try and get a feel for the business model my customer/client is trying to emulate with the application they want built. Are we building a glorified forms processor? Are we retrieving data from multiple sources in a single application to save time? Are we performing some kind of integration?
Once the general businesss model is established, I then move to the "must" and "must nots" for the application to dictate what data I can retrieve, who can perform what functions, etc.
Usually if you can get the customer to explain their model or workflow, you can move from there and find additional key questions.
The one question I always make sure to ask in some form or another is "What is the trickiest/most annoying thing you have to do when doing X. Typically the answer to that reveals the craziest business/data rule you'll have to implement.
Hope this helps!
Steve Yegge talks fun but there is money to be made in working out what other people's requirements are so i'd take his article with a pinch of salt.
Requirements gathering is incredibly tough because of the manner in which communication works. Its a four step process that is lossy in each step.
I have an idea in my head
I transform this into words and pictures
You interpret the pictures and words
You paint an image in your own mind of what my original idea was like
And humans fail miserably at this with worrying frequency through their adorable imperfections.
Agile does right in promoting iterative development. Getting early versions out to the client is important in identifying what features are most important (what ships in 0.1 - 0.5 ish), helps to keep you both on the right track in terms of how the application will work and quickly identifies the hidden features that you will miss.
The two main problem scenarios are the two ends of the scales:
Not having a freaking clue about what you are doing - get some domain experts
Having too many requirements - feature pit. - Question, cull (prioritise ;) ) features and use iterative development
Yegge does well in pointing out that domain experts are essential to produce good requirements because they know the business and have worked in it. They can help identify the core desire of the client and will help explain how their staff will use the system and what is important to the staff.
Alternatives and additions include trying to do the job yourself to get into the mindset or having a client staff member occasionally on-site, although the latter is unlikely to happen.
The feature pit is the other side, mostly full of failed government IT projects. Too much, too soon, not enough thought or application of realism (but what do you expect they have only about four years to make themselves feel important?). The aim here is to work out what the customer really wants.
As long as you work on getting the core components correct, efficient and bug-free clients usually remain tolerant of missing features that arrive in later shipments, as long as they eventually arrive. This is where iterative development really helps.
Remember to separate the client's ideas of what the program will be like and what they want the program to achieve.
Some clients can create confusion by communicating their requirements in the form of application features which may be poorly thought out or made redundant by much simpler functionality then they think they require. While I'm not advocating calling the client an idiot or not listening to them I feel that it is worth forever asking why they want a particular feature to get to its underlying purpose.
Remember that in either scenario it is of imperative importantance to root out the quickest path to fulfilling the customers core need and put you in a scenario where you are both profiting from the relationship.
Wow, where to start?
First, there is a set of knowledge someone should have to do analysis on some projects, but it really depends on what you are building for who. In other words, it makes a big difference if you are modifying an enterprise application for a Fortune 100 corporation, building an iPhone app, or adding functionality to a personal webpage.
Second, there are different kinds of requirements.
Objectives: What does the user want to accomplish?
Functional: What does the user need to do in order to reach their objective? (think steps to reach the objective/s)
Non-functional: What are the constraints your program needs to perform within? (think 10 vs 10k simultaneous users, growth, back-up, etc.)
Business rules: What dynamic constraints do you have to meet? (think calculations, definitions, legal concerns, etc.)
Third, the way to gather requirements most effectively, and then get feedback on them (which you will do, right?) is to use models. User cases and user stories are a model of what the user needs to do. Process models are another version of what needs to happen. System diagrams are just another model of how different parts of the program(s) interact. Good data modeling will define business concepts and show you the inputs, outputs, and changes that happen within your program. Models (and there are more than I listed) are really the key to the concern you list. A few good models will capture the needs and from models you can determine your requirements.
Fourth, get feedback. I know I mentioned this already, but you will not get everything right the first time, so get responses to what your customer wants.
As much as I appreciate requirements, and the models that drive them, users typically do not understand the ramifications of of all their requests. Constant communication with chances for review and feedback will give users a better understanding of what you are delivering. Further, they will refine their understanding based on what they see. Unless you're working for the government, iterations and / or prototypes are helpful.
First of all gather the requirements before you start coding. You can begin the design while you are gathering them depending on your project life cicle but you shouldn't ever start coding without them.
Requirements are a set of well written documents that protect both the client and yourself. Never forget that. If no requirement is present then it was not paid for (and thus it requires a formal change request), if it's present then it must be implemented and must work correctly.
Requirements must be testable. If a requirement cannot be tested then it isn't a requirement. That means something like, "The system "
Requirements must be concrete. That means stating "The system user interface shall be easy to use" is not a correct requirment.
In order to actually "gather" the requirements you need to first make sure you understand the businness model. The client will tell you what they want with its own words, it is your job to understand it and interpret it in the right context.
Make meetings with the client while you're developing the requirements. Describe them to the client with your own words and make sure you and the client have the same concept in the requirements.
Requirements require concise, testable example, but keep track of every other thing that comes up in the meetings, diagrams, doubts and try to mantain a record of every meeting.
If you can use an incremental life cycle, that will give you the ability to improve some bad gathered requirements.
You can never ask too many or "stupid" questions. The more questions you ask, the more answers you receive.
According to Steve Yegge that's the wrong question to ask. If you're gathering requirement it's already too late, your project is doomed.
High-level discussions about purpose, scope, limitations of operating environment, size, etc
Audition a single paragraph description of the system, hammer it out
Mock up UI
Formalize known requirements
Now iterate between 3 and 4 with more and more functional prototypes and more specs with more details. Write tests as you go. Do this until you have functional software and a complete, objective, testable requirements spec.
That's the dream. The reality is usually after a couple iterations everybody goes head-down and codes until there's a month left to test.
Gathering Business Requirements Are Bullshit - Steve Yegge
read the agile manifesto - working software is the only measurement for the success of a software project
get familiar with agile software practices - study Scrum , lean programming , xp etc - this will save you tremendous amount of time not only for the requirements gathering but also for the entire software development lifecycle
keep regular discussions with Customers and especially the future users and key-users
make sure you talk to the Persons understanding the problem domain - e.g. specialists in the field
Take small notes during the talks
After each CONVERSATION write an official requirement list and present it for approving. Later on it would be difficult to argue against all agreed documentation
make sure your Customers know approximately what are the approximate expenses in time and money for implementing "nice to have" requirements
make sure you label the requirements as "must have" , "should have" and "nice to have" from the very beginning, ensure Customers understand the differences between those types also
integrate all documents into the latest and final requirements analysis (or the current one for the iteration or whatever agile programming cycle you are using ... )
remember that requirements do change over the software life cycle , so gathering is one thing but managing and implementing another
KISS - keep it as simple as possible
study also the environment where the future system will reside - there are more and more technological restraints from legacy or surrounding systems , since the companies do not prefer to throw to the garbage the money they have invested for decades even if in our modern minds 20 years old code is garbage ...
Like most stages of the software development process its iteration works best.
First find out who your users are -- the XYZ dept,
Then find out where they fit into the organisation -- part of Z division,
Then find out what they do in general terms -- manage cash
Then in specific terms -- collect cash from tills, and check for till fraud.
Then you can start talking to them.
Ask what problem they want you want to solve -- you will get an answer like write a bamboozling system using OCR with shark technoligies.
Ignore that answer and ask some more questions to find out what the real problem is -- they cant read the till slips to reconcile the cash.
Agree a real solution with the users -- get a better ink ribbon supplier - or connect the electronic tills to the network and upload the logs to a central server.
Then agree in detail how they will measure the success of the project.
Then and only then propose and agree a detailed set of requirements.
I would suggest you to read Roger-Pressman's Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach
Before you go talking to the stakeholders/users/anyone be sure you will be able to put down the gathered information in a usefull and days-lasting way.
Use a sound-recorder if it is OK with the other person and the information is bulky.
If you heard something important and you need some reasonable time to write it down, you have two choices: ask the other person to wait a second, or say goodbye to that precious information. You wont remember it right, ask any neuro-scientist.
If you detect that a point need deeper review or that you need some document you just heard of, make sure you make a commitment with the other person to send that document or schedule another meeting with a more specific purpose. Never say "I'll remember to ask for that xls file" because in most cases you wont.
Not to long after the meeting, summarize all your notes, recordings and fresh thoughts. Just summarize it rigth. Create effective reminders for the commitments.
Again, just after the meeting, is the perfect time to understand why the gathering you just did was not as right as you thought at the end of the meeting. That's when you will be able to put down a lot of meaningful questions for another meeting.
I know the question was in the perspective of the pre-meeting, but please be aware that you can work on this matters before the meeting and end up with a much usefull, complete and quality gathering.
I've been using mind mapping (like a work breakdown structure) to help gather requirements and define the unknowns (the #1 project killer). Start at a high level and work your way down. You need to work with the sponsors, users and development team to ensure you get all the angles and don't miss anything. You can't be expected to know the entire scope of what they want without their involvement...you - as a project manager/BA - need to get them involved (most important part of the job).
There are some great ideas here already. Here are some requirements gathering principles that I always like to keep in mind:
Know the difference between the user and the customer.
The business owners that approve the shiny project are usually the customers. However, a devastating mistake is the tendency to confuse them as the user. The customer is usually the person that recognizes the need for your product, but the user is the person that will actually be using the solution (and will most likely complain later about a requirement your product did not meet).
Go to more than one person
Because we’re all human, and we tend to not remember every excruciating detail. You increase your likelihood of finding missed requirements as you talk to more people and cross-check.
Avoid specials
When a user asks for something very specific, be wary. Always question the biases and see if this will really make your product better.
Prototype
Don’t wait till launch to show what you have to the user. Do frequent prototypes (you can even call them beta versions) and get constant feedback throughout the development process. You’ll probably find more requirements as you do this.
I recently started using the concepts, standards and templates defined by the International Institute of Business Analysts organization (IIBA).
They have a pretty good BOK (Book of Knowledge) that can be downloaded from their website. They do also have a certificate.
Requirements Engineering is a bit of an art, there are lots of different ways to go about it, you really have to tailor it to your project and the stakeholders involved. A good place to start is with Requirements Engineering by Karl Wiegers:
http://www.amazon.com/Software-Requirements-Second-Pro-Best-Practices/dp/0735618798/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234910330&sr=8-2
and a requirements engineering process which may consist of a number of steps e.g.:
Elicitation - for the basis for discussion with the business
Analysis and Description - a technical description for the purpose of the developers
Elaboration, Clarification, Verification and Negotiation - further refinement of the requirements
Also, there are a number of ways of documenting the requirements (Use Cases, Prototypes, Specifications, Modelling Languages). Each have their advantages and disadvantages. For example prototypes are very good for elicitation of ideas from the business and discussion of ideas.
I generally find that writing a set of use cases and including wireframe prototypes works well to identify an initial set of requirements. From that point it's a continual process of working with technical people and business people to further clarify and elaborate on the requirements. Keeping track of what was initially agreed and tracking additional requirements are essential to avoid scope creep. Negotiation plays a bit part here also between the various parties as per the Broken Iron Triangle (http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/brokenTriangle.html).
IMO the most important first step is to set up a dictornary of domain-specific words. When your client says "order", what does he mean? Something he receives from his customers or something he sends to his suppliers? Or maybe both?
Find the keywords in the stakeholders' business, and let them explain those words until you comprehend their meaning in the process. Without that, you will have a hard time trying to understand the requirements.
i wrote a blog article about the approach i use:
http://pm4web.blogspot.com/2008/10/needs-analysis-for-business-websites.html
basically: questions to ask your client before building their website.
i should add this questionnaire sheet is only geared towards basic website builds - like a business web presence. totally different story if you are talking about web-based software. although some of it is still relavant (e.g. questions relating to look and feel).
LM
I prefer to keep my requirements gathering process as simple, direct and thorough as possible. You can download a sample document that I use as a template for my projects at this blog posting: http://allthingscs.blogspot.com/2011/03/documenting-software-architectural.html