The Advantages of Establishing Relationships and Dependencies

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How does a business analyst know that each requirement adds business value and meets the customer’s expectations? By establishing relationships and dependencies. This process involves tracing or setting links between and among requirements and other production information.

All of the building blocks of the product need to be traced individually, but you also have to be aware of how one block impacts the others. Identifying the dependencies between them is a must if you want to keep yourself — and your product — away from a lot of trouble

Like many elements of business analysis, establishing relationships and dependencies isn’t a static exercise. Rather, as more product information emerges, the relationships and dependencies must progressively expand.

There’s no clearer way to ensure a product’s relevancy than by tracing each component to the business need, goals and objectives. Identifying dependencies and relationships can also provide a structure to prioritize requirements and product features so you can build a roadmap. This makes it easier for the business analyst to fall back onto a minimal viable product in case there are problems building other planned features in the future.

Because relationships and dependencies support monitoring and controlling, they can also keep the product scope in check. When product information cannot be traced back to the project scope and business goals, it’s easy to see that information is non-value-added — and should spark further scrutiny.

By making sure that all requirements are allocated inside a feature or artifact of the product, business analysts can make sure that no artifact or feature is forgotten during the requirements elicitation process. As product information is clarified and the product is built, tested and implemented, forward traceability allows the business analyst to ensure that requirements aren’t overlooked and that product information is not dropped.

Rare is the change that happens in a vacuum. And identifying dependencies upfront makes it easier to comprehensively assess how one change might impact related components.

When analyzing release decisions, a business analyst might take into account dependencies between product information as well as things like implementation, benefit or value relationships.