Business Analysis, Requirements, and Project Management: A Guide for Computing Students

IT projects emerge from a business need. In practice, software developers must accomplish two big things before an IT project can begin: find out what you need to do (i.e., analyse business requirements) and plan out how to do it (i.e., project management). The biggest problem in IT projects is delivering the wrong product because IT people do not understand what business people require. This practical textbook teaches computer science students how to manage and deliver IT projects by linking business and IT requirements with project management in an incremental and straightforward approach.

Business Analysis, Requirements, and Project Management: A Guide for Computing Students presents an approach to analysis management that scales the business perspective. It takes a business process view of a business proposal as a model and explains how to structure a technical problem into a recognisable pattern with problem frames. It shows how to identify core transactions and model them as use cases to create a requirements table useful to designers and coders. Linked to the analysis are three management tools: the product breakdown structure (PBS), the Gantt chart, and the Kanban board. The PBS is derived in part from the problem frame. The Gantt chart emerges from the PBS and ensures the key requirements are addressed by reference to use cases. The Kanban board is especially useful in Task Driven Development, which the text covers.

This textbook consists of two interleaving parts and features a single case study. Part one addresses the business and requirements perspective. The second integrates core project management approaches and explains how both requirements and management are connected. The remainder of the book is appendices, the first of which provides solutions to the exercises presented in each chapter. The second appendix puts together much of the documentation for the case study into one place. The case study presents a real-word business scenario to expose students to professional practice.

Karl Cox is a senior lecturer in Computing at the University of Brighton, where he teaches business analysis, modelling, requirements and management. Prior to this, he worked in Australia as a senior research scientist at NICTA Ltd and was co-director of a boutique management consulting business. Dr Cox has published extensively in the academic literature and has recently turned to writing books useful for students as he noticed there were areas of the software lifecycle that did not address immediate student needs in their study. Dr. Cox is also an active speaker for the environment and for health. He has given numerous talks for The World Foundation for Natural Science on topics such as GMO, on digital addiction and on the risks of vaping.