Choose Appropriate Trawling Techniques (Process Notes 2.3.2) | Mastering the Requirements Process (2nd Edition)

To choose the most suitable trawling techniques for a business event, you need to consider the following issues:

What are the potential sources of knowledge?
What type of requirement are you searching for: policy architecture, stored data, person-machine interface, essential activity?
Will you be able to speak directly to people?
Is the knowledge conscious, unconscious, or undreamed of?

Here are some guidelines on the strengths of a number of trawling techniques:

Review the current situation.
- Good for uncovering unconscious requirements
- Helps when adding new requirements or doing maintenance changes to an existing system
- Use as the basis of business process reengineering
Apprentice with the user.
- Helps to uncover unconscious and conscious requirements
- Useful when users are "too busy" to talk
Determine the essential requirements.
- Helps to separate requirements from solutions
- A good way to understand the real purpose of the system
- Helps in uncovering unconscious requirements and provides insights that trigger undreamed-of requirements
Interview the users.
- A good technique for discovering conscious requirements
Brainstorm.
- Helps uncover undreamed-of requirements
- Very useful when inventing new products with unknown/potential users
Conduct use case workshops.
- Involves the users in explaining vague, complex, and difficult events
- Good for uncovering conscious and unconscious requirements
Undertake document archaeology.
- Used when your source of information is documents
Build event models.
- If the business event boundaries are vague, then investigate them by doing some detailed systems analysis modeling.
Make requirements videos.
- Useful when users' time is limited
- Can be studied, analyzed, and used by a group after the video is made
- Helps when the context is vague

See Chapter 5, Trawling for Requirements, for more guidance on trawling techniques.