Preparing the Customer
The guided interview will provide the requirements analyst with a wealth of information. However, without both sides of the interview being properly prepared, there will be periods of inefficiency while the customer searches for answers to the analysts questions. To help the customer prepare for the interview, there will be a series of documents sent to them about User Stories and Business Events/Use Cases. It is important to acclimate the customer to both of these requirements gathering tools to ensure that we have access to requirements concepts at multiple levels of abstraction.
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Concurrently with the customer learning about Business Events/Use Cases and User Stories, the requirements analyst should be taking the answers to questions from the initial contact and preparing the Interview Guide. This document will be sent to the customer at least three business days BEFORE the scheduled interview to allow the customer to prepare answers and have any materials (forms, examples) on hand.
Purpose Statement
Every Interview Guide should begin with an overall statement of purpose for the interview. This purpose statement is to ensure that the interview has a clear overall goal. It should also be used during the interview to ensure the interview stays on topic and doesn’t veer off into another discussion. Should there be a significant discovery of new functionality or problem areas, additional interviews can be scheduled. The purpose statement should generally be phrased as:
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To discover the methods and standard practices that the MRC uses to provide AV and technical support to events in order to help design a system which will automate and track equipment/inventory as well as provide additional billing capabilities.
Interview Objectives
To ensure that the interview produces the required information, it is critical to have a set of interview objectives listed in the interview guide as well. These objectives should be measurable pieces of information. All interview objectives should support the general purpose statement of the interview. A good list of Interview Objectives contains between five and ten objectives.
Crafting the Interview Questions
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Category | Current Situation | Future Situation |
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Customer Expectation |
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Regulatory Issues |
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Interdepartmental Data/Process Ownership Concerns |
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Process Efficiency |
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Information Scope/Capacity |
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Conducting the Interview
The recommended interview team size is three analysts. A team leader actually asks most of the questions, one team member is the scribe to catch verbatim the customer's responses and the third team member is an observer/asks additional follow-up/probing questions. Given the size of ETC this will most likely need to be reduced to two member interview teams on everything except the most intensive and large projects.
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- When the customer uses judging terms, such as “better”, analysts should probe for information about
- What criteria are used for comparison? Better compared to what?
- Who is the judge of “better”? Our customers or the end-users?
- When the customer uses exclusionary terms, such as “never” or “always”, analysts should probe for more information about
- Is it truly always or never?
- If there are exceptions how are they handled?
Output from the Interview
After the interview is complete, the customer should be thanked for their time and asked to go over their Business Event/Use Cases and User Stories again using the information that has been covered in the interview. The analysts should ask for the customer to send them copies of the updated documents within a week if possible. The analyst team should adjourn to debrief on the results of the interview and begin the process of creating a set of Business Events/Use Case and User Story documents of their own.
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