How requirements questions
- How will you use this feature?
- Is this feature a process and, if so, what are the steps? Or, what questions can I ask to ascertain the steps?
- How might we meet this business need?
- How might we think about this feature a bit differently?
- How will we know this is complete?
Where requirements questions
- Where does the process start?
- Where would the user access this feature?
- Where would the user be located physically when using this feature?
- Where would the results be visible?
When requirements questions
- When will this feature be used?
- When do you need to know about…?
- When will the feature fail?
- When will we be ready to start?
Who requirements questions
- Who will use this feature?
- Who will deliver the inputs for the feature?
- Who will receive the outputs of the feature?
- Who will learn about the results of someone using this feature?
- Who can I ask to learn more about this?
What requirements questions
- What do I know about this feature?
- Or, what assumptions am I making about this feature that I need to confirm?
- What does this feature need to do?
- What is the end result of doing this?
- What are the pieces of this feature?
- What needs to happen next?
- What must happen before?
- What if….? Think of all the alternative scenarios and ask questions about what should happen if those scenarios are true.
- What needs to be tracked?
Why requirements questions
Why questions are great wrap-up questions as they help confirm that the requirements you just elicited map back to a need you identified when you scoped the project.
- Is there any other way to accomplish this?
- Does this feature meet the business need and solve the problem we’re trying to solve?
(You’ll notice that we don’t typically ask a why question by using the word “why”. Among other reasons that’s because we don’t want to sound like a 2-year-0ld and annoying our stakeholders, even as we apply the 5 Whys Technique.)
