Requirements Management in PEGA

Requirements Management

Requirements management helps ensure the business application you build validates and meets the needs of all customers and stakeholders. Requirements management is a continuous process throughout a project.

When building an application, you follow a set of requirements that define what the application must be able to do. The success of an implementation depends on your ability to understand, track, and trace these requirements.

Requirements management helps keep the project team organized and provides visibility into every aspect of the project.

Managing Requirements Using DCO

Using DCO, business and IT collaborate using a common visual model.

Every aspect of the application — business goals, processes, UI, data models, even integration and security — is captured visually.

Project team members have access to updated, consistent information. This helps to build a common understanding of the solution.

Requirements can be traced from inception through release to ensure that all requested functionality is delivered.

Business Objectives

Business objectives serve as the basis for decision making throughout analysis, design, and development of the Pega application. Specific, measurable objectives can be reported on as the Pega application is built. Completed objectives serve as a milestone to show stakeholders the measurable value delivered to the business by Pega.

Application Requirements

A requirement uses business language to describe what the application must do to meet your business needs.

Requirements can serve as an inventory of events, conditions, or functions that must be implemented and tracked in a development project.

A good requirement conveys the same meaning to multiple audiences.

A requirement uses business language to describe what the application must do to meet your business needs.

Requirements can range from high-level abstract statements of services to more detailed functional specifications.

Requirements can also provide benchmarks to test your application against.

Think of requirements as an inventory of events, conditions, or functions that must be implemented and tracked in a development project.

Five Types of Requirements

Business Rule - Identifies requirements usually associated with a specific use case or step in a process

Change Control - Identifies how to manage changes in the application

Enterprise Standard - Identifies requirements that apply across the enterprise, or are an industry standard that all applications must adhere to

Functional - Identifies a function that will be used in the application, such as calculations or data manipulation

Non-Functional - Identifies performance metrics, such as screen-to-screen interaction times

Application Specifications

Once you understand what you want to do, you need to turn your attention to how you are going to do it. Specifications define how you implement your application.

Specifications use business language to describe the steps needed to meet a requirement.

Many specifications may be linked to a single requirement.

A single specification may be linked to more than one requirement.

 

Traceability of Specifications and Requirements

In Pega, specifications are the center of traceability.

Traceability is the ability to link specifications back to business objectives and requirements, and forward to implementation artifacts, and test cases.

Relationship Between Pega Design Artifacts

In Pega, you link your business objectives, requirements, and specifications as you create them.

Business objectives are identified at the inception of the project. In the example the business objective identified was Eliminate errors in personal information.

A business architect elaborates on the Enroll in benefits online requirement and generates a set of specifications. At this time, you link specifications to the requirements they link to. By doing this, you have an accurate picture that they relate to one another. You also save time from having to do it later when there are more requirements and specifications to manage. When the specification is implemented, it is the system architects job to link the implementation to the specification. In the example, that is mapping the UI screen to the collect personal info specification.