Every few years, new technology makes an advance in capability that enables more efficient development processes. This webinar describes the ICONIX Business Modeling Roadmap — a process that combines two advances in tools capability to enable a quantum leap in development processes, automating time-consuming steps in business modeling and requirements elicitation, and eliminating errors in translation in the enforcement of business rules. The Business Modeling Roadmap enables business applications that provably meet their requirements to be built quickly and efficiently, while avoiding analysis paralysis.

You’ll learn:
•       How to identify business requirements using narrative business process scenarios and automatically generated activity diagrams
•       How to define business rules and automatically generate algorithmic code for their enforcement, without programming
•       How to identify software use cases for “automatable” business processes and drive these use cases forward all the way to code
•       How to model the problem domain, and why this is fundamentally important to all of the above steps
•       Lessons learned from a case study of a system redesign and implementation at a major healthcare company (anonymity requested to protect the guilty)

Presenter: Doug Rosenberg founded ICONIX in 1984 in order to apply best practices in analysis and architecture to real world software development. Doug has written five books on Software Engineering, most recently “Use Case Driven Object Modeling – Theory and Practice” and currently has two additional titles under development.

Finding Missing Requirements with IBM Rational Requirements Composer (RRC)

IBM RRC is the most talked about Requirements product of 2009. This webinar will include demonstrations of IBM RRC as well as Ravenflow’s RAVEN Visual Analyzer for RRC.

IBM Rational® Requirements Composer® is a requirements definition solution that enables organizations to enhance their requirements processes with easy-to-use elicitation and definition capabilities. Providing various visual and collaborative tools, Requirements Composer enables the capture and refinement of business needs into unambiguous requirements that drive improved quality, speed, and alignment across the IT lifecycle.

RAVEN Visual Analyzer is a plug-in component that adds powerful requirements visualization and analysis capabilities to IBM® Rational® Requirements Composer. Designed to work seamlessly with Composer, RAVEN Visual Analyzer helps optimize requirements elicitation and validation activities, saving time and improving overall requirements quality.

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The cost of rework, poor quality, and the associated delays in realizing return on investment continue to plague IT organizations.  Getting the requirements right is critical to solving these problems.  

This webinar, drawing on years of practical experience at Accenture, will describe how applying standardized techniques and enabling users through tools and usage guidance helps reduce costs, increase quality, and deliver applications sooner.

Join this webinar to learn:
• Key requirements gathering techniques
• How requirements techniques can be used effectively together
• How an integrated set of tools can be used to automate and enable the techniques

Presenter: Randy Vogel

Randy Vogel is a Partner at Accenture with over 21 years of experience in IT and software development. Randy has been responsible for delivering applications across a broad spectrum of platforms and technologies using globally distributed development teams. Randy currently leads Accenture’s strategic tools program focused on standardizing the tools and processes used globally to deliver high-quality solutions to Accenture clients.

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RAVEN allows business analysts to produce clear specifications of their business process and application needs, including support for defining and documenting business workflows, uses cases, and functional requirements in Microsoft Word. Based upon patented technology, RAVEN is the only product that analyzes plain English text to automatically generate process descriptions, diagrams, and requirements specifications that both business and IT stakeholders can understand.

Learn:
* How BA’s and requirements managers across the world are getting twice as much done with better stakeholder buy-in
* How to create visual models of business processes and use cases from inside Microsoft Word
* How RAVEN Express and RAVEN Professional fit in the RAVEN product family
* The most useful tips and tricks for evaluating RAVEN

Please download and install the 30-day free trial version of RAVEN before attending this webinar.

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Chris Wong, Agile Strategist

Designers in California, developers in Asia, India and Eastern Europe.  Multiple languages, multiple time zones – complex software development.  Sound familiar?  How do you manage communications and consistency – ensuring quality results?    Yep, I’m speaking to those of us who for a variety of reasons (economic mostly) have accepted the opportunity and challenge of leveraging outsourced resources to scale our ability to do more, for less.  For those who can relate, experience has shown that one of the best ways of optimizing our chances at success is to do the best we can to be comprehensive and clear as it relates to business requirements and design.  Clear requirements = comprehensive designs = less to communicate/discuss = better code = quality results (or best shot at it).

 No easy task I would add if you’ve ever experienced being around a conference table at midnight, staring down Red Bull empties, pouring through documentation over a poor Skype connection – communicating slowly and deliberately.

How do you make it stop?  How do you make it better?

In my experience, having tried a number of things over 25 years, emphasizing completeness at the requirements phase and focusing efforts communicating clearly – graphically (the true universal language) so everyone can understand no matter their level of technical expertise, language they speak or cultural context – diagrams, tables, flow charts, templates, etc. have proven to be successful.  In fact, there are a variety of visual requirements definition and design tools available to help today.  Tools that can transform traditional requirements definitions into requirements visualization, where complex process and flows are displayed as easily understandable visual diagrams.

Making as much use of structured/functional components can not only create a consistent developer’s language, but it can insure consistency through repetition and uniformity.  Less confusion, more productive collaboration, clearer decision making, better results.

A picture truly is worth a thousand words…

In this webinar, we will discuss how to:

• Improve facilitation, elicitation, and validation techniques
• Overcome reluctance to lead/facilitate elicitation sessions
• Recognize and develop essential elicitation traits and skills that include:
◦ Curiosity
◦ Fearlessness
◦ Questioning mind
◦ Attention to detail

Who Should Attend?

Business analysts, consultants, project managers, and anyone who is responsible for gathering business and user requirements.

Topics:

•Effective elicitation sessions
•Requirements definition process
•Critical elicitation skills
•Elicitation and validation preparation
•Elicitation techniques and pitfalls
•Gap analysis
•Scope/impact analysis
•Practice elicitation session
•Becoming proficient at elicitation/validation
•Reviewing results (web and documentation)

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Featuring Forrester Senior Research Analyst Mary Gerush

Today’s Leaner, More Agile Software Delivery Processes Call For “New World” Business Analysis

Organizations are seeking to become more lean and agile, and software development and delivery practices have evolved to support this goal. With agile and lean, business and technology teams work together more closely, requirements processes change as new techniques focus on elimination of waste, and documentation is not as important as it has been in traditional software delivery environments.

Join us for this webinar as Forrester Research Analyst Mary Gerush talks with you about the following:
• How is business analysis and requirements definition and management changing?
• And how do your business analysts fit in this new environment?

This webinar will explore the continued importance of strong business analysts in mastering business-IT alignment during changing times. It will also investigate the evolving role, skills, and practices of the current and “new world” business analyst.

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