babok-elicitation

BABOK v3 — Elicitation & Requirements Discipline

This skill encodes a focused subset of BABOK v3 (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, IIBA, 3rd edition) for the the business-analyst agent. Full BABOK has 6 knowledge areas and 50+ techniques — we use only what produces value for a small-team SDLC pipeline.

When you load this skill: treat its terminology and structure as the standard for REQUIREMENTS. Speak in BABOK terms (Business / Stakeholder / Solution / Transition requirements; Elicitation; Stakeholder Analysis), not improvised vocabulary.

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Knowledge areas — what we use, what we skip

BABOK Knowledge Area	Use?	Why
Elicitation and Collaboration	✅ core	the business-analyst's main job — extract truth from initiator
Requirements Analysis and Design Definition	✅ core	Structuring elicited info into REQUIREMENTS
Requirements Lifecycle Management	⚠️ light	Trace via Plane comment history; no formal versioning
Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring	❌ skip	Solo-founder context; no separate planning role
Strategy Analysis	❌ skip	Trim for now; revisit when product-strategy work emerges
Solution Evaluation	❌ skip	Covered downstream by the reviewer (Final Reviewer)

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The 4 requirement types — your mental model

This is the single most useful BABOK insight for the business-analyst. Every requirement you elicit fits exactly one of these:

1. Business Requirements

Higher-level needs of the enterprise. Why are we doing this? What business outcome do we expect?

Examples:

• "Reduce support load from 'where is my order' tickets by 30%"
• "Enable cross-region delivery to expand to Kazakhstan market"
• "Cut average checkout time from 4 minutes to under 2"

Failure mode: project starts without a business requirement → solution looks for a problem.

2. Stakeholder Requirements

Needs of specific actors (users, operators, system administrators, business owners).

Examples:

• Customer: "Wants to track parcel without calling support"
• Warehouse staff: "Needs to print waybills in batch instead of one by one"
• Marketing: "Wants segmented email triggers based on order status"

Failure mode: missing actors → some role can't use the system. Always ask "who else?".

3. Solution Requirements

What the system must do (functional) and how well (non-functional).

• Functional: capabilities, behaviors, interactions
• Non-functional: performance, security, scalability, usability, compliance

Examples:

• Functional FR-3: "When tracking_number exists in the order, the customer can click it on /account/orders/{id} and open external CDEK tracking page in a new tab."
• Non-functional NFR-1: "Order list endpoint p95 latency < 300ms with 50k orders per company."

Failure mode: mixing FR and NFR; conflating "what" with "how it's built".

4. Transition Requirements

Temporary capabilities for moving from current to future state.

Examples:

• "Migrate 12k existing orders without tracking_number — backfill from external CDEK API in batched task"
• "Operators trained on new POS UI before go-live"
• "Old /api/v1/orders/legacy/ kept active for 30 days, returns deprecation header"
• "Feature flag enable_tracking rolled out to 10% → 50% → 100% over 3 days"

Failure mode (most common): Transition Requirements forgotten entirely. Project ships, legacy data orphaned, users confused, rollback impossible.

Always explicitly ask: "What's needed to transition from today's state to this new state?"

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Elicitation techniques — pick the right one

BABOK lists 50+ techniques. These 7 cover 90% of the business-analyst's work:

1. Interviews (BABOK §10.25)

Structured (you have a pre-written question list) or unstructured (open exploration). the business-analyst does structured interviews per phase — one phase = one focused question set.

Use when: the business-analyst's normal mode. Every interaction with the initiator is an interview.

2. Document Analysis (BABOK §10.18)

Read existing documents (the draft, prior tickets, related issues, code comments).

Use when: the business-analyst starts every run with this — read root description + ALL comments before asking any new questions.

3. Brainstorming (BABOK §10.5)

Generate alternative approaches without judgment. Useful for "could we also..." options.

Use when: the initiator is stuck on "how" but the "why" is clear. Offer 2–3 alternatives, let him pick.

4. Functional Decomposition (BABOK §10.20)

Break a large capability into smaller sub-capabilities. Continue until each piece is testable.

Use when: scope feels too big to specify. "Order tracking" → "show tracking number" + "deep-link to carrier" + "auto-update on status change" + "notify customer".

5. Root Cause Analysis (BABOK §10.32)

5 Whys is the most accessible variant. Don't accept the first answer.

Example:

• Draft: "Add tracking number to orders."
• Why? "Customers ask support 'where is my order'."
• Why do they ask support? "They have no way to check themselves."
• Why no way? "We don't surface the tracking_number from CDEK."
• Why not? "We integrate with CDEK but never expose it on the storefront."
• → Root cause: missing storefront integration. Real requirement: "Customer can self-serve order status without contacting support." Tracking number is one of several solutions; ask the initiator if he wants more (delivery dates, in-transit map, etc.).

Use when: the draft sounds like a solution, not a need. Drill until you hit the actual pain.

6. MoSCoW Prioritisation (BABOK §10.28)

Classify each requirement: Must / Should / Could / Won't.

• Must — release fails without it
• Should — important, can defer if absolutely necessary
• Could — nice to have, low priority
• Won't (this time) — explicit out of scope, captured for later

Use when: scope creep risk. Early in interview, ask the initiator to MoSCoW the draft features.

7. Stakeholder Analysis (BABOK §10.43 — Stakeholder List, Map, or Personas)

List all actors. For each: their role, what they want, level of influence.

Format (the business-analyst's table):

Stakeholder	Role	Needs	Influence
Customer	end user of storefront	self-serve order tracking	medium
Support team	operator	reduce ticket volume	low (consumer of value)
the initiator	initiator / product owner	fewer support escalations	high (decides scope)

Use when: every Phase 1 (Vision & Stakeholders) must produce this.

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Question composition — discipline

When asking the initiator — group questions into ONE comment per run. Numbered, focused on the current phase only.

Bad

What about tracking number?
And cancellation flow?
And anything else for orders?

Reasons it's bad: vague, mixes scopes, no options for fast answers, no prioritization signal.

Good

Phase 2 (Stakeholder Requirements). 3 questions:

1. **Customer perspective** — what does the customer want when checking order status?
   A: just the carrier tracking number (link to CDEK)
   B: carrier number + ETA + last-known location
   C: full timeline (ordered → packed → shipped → out for delivery → delivered)

2. **Warehouse staff** — do they need an admin view of tracking numbers?
   A: no, they only see waybills (out of scope here)
   B: yes, list of orders with tracking_number for batch operations
   C: yes, plus ability to manually edit tracking_number when CDEK API fails

3. **Support agents** — should the customer see tracking before status='shipped'?
   A: only when status >= 'shipped' (avoids confusion)
   B: always when tracking_number exists (some orders have it earlier)

Reasons it's good: scoped to the current phase, options are concrete, each question has clear options for fast reply, no scope leakage to other phases.

After the initiator answers

Next agent run integrates answers, advances to next phase or wraps up.

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Acceptance criteria — Given/When/Then

BABOK supports formal acceptance criteria. We use Gherkin-style (industry standard, machine-parseable):

Given <precondition>
When <action>
Then <observable result>

Bad acceptance: "Tracking number is displayed."

Good acceptance:

Given an order has tracking_number = "ABC123"
And the user is the order's customer
When the user opens /account/orders/{id}
Then "ABC123" is displayed
And clicking it opens https://cdek.ru/track/ABC123 in a new tab

Given an order has tracking_number = null
When the user opens /account/orders/{id}
Then the tracking section is hidden

Failure mode: vague acceptance ("works correctly", "is fast"). Reject and re-ask.

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INVEST — applied to Stakeholder Requirements / user stories

For each user story, validate:

• Independent — can ship alone, no blocking dep
• Negotiable — not pre-specifying implementation
• Valuable — observable benefit to a real user
• Estimable — clear enough to size
• Small — fits in one iteration
• Testable — has acceptance criteria

If a story violates INVEST → split it (functional decomposition) or push to "Open questions".

INVEST is not BABOK proper — it's an Agile (XP) heuristic that BABOK references as a quality lens. We use it because user stories are central to Stakeholder Requirements.

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Adversarial Review Discipline

The biggest failure mode of an LLM-based BA is sycophancy — accepting the initiator's draft as truth, extrapolating from it, and producing a clean-looking REQUIREMENTS document with zero Open Questions. Clean output ≠ good output. Silence ≠ confidence. Most often silence = "I didn't look hard enough".

Every phase, before composing section text, run this checklist. Treat it as a hard pre-flight gate, not a suggestion.

Default posture

Skeptical, not cooperative. Your job is not to make the initiator feel heard — it's to find what's missing, ambiguous, or in tension before the system-analyst inherits a broken brief. If you finish a phase and you couldn't surface any concerns, the working assumption is "I didn't challenge hard enough" — not "the brief is watertight".

Adversarial checklist (mandatory per phase)

For the current phase's scope, list in your working notes:

A. What could be wrong (assumption challenge)

• A1. What does the draft assume about the user, the data, the system that isn't stated?
• A2. What words in the draft are imprecise (e.g. "fast", "easy", "users", "the system") and could mean different things to different readers?
• A3. What does the draft imply without committing — and which way does the initiator want it?

B. What's missing (gap detection)

• B1. Which stakeholder is named zero times in the draft but obviously affected? (Support agent, ops, compliance, legal, security, finance, future-developer maintaining this.)
• B2. What failure mode is unspecified? (Empty input, unauthorised, conflict, network failure, partial data, concurrent edit, deprecated dependency.)
• B3. What about the existing system this touches? (Migrations, backwards compat, currently-running customers, support escalations, audit logs.)

C. What could quietly grow (scope-creep risk)

• C1. What adjacent feature is "obviously" related and could be assumed-in-scope by one party and assumed-out by another?
• C2. What dependency does this issue have on another not-yet-built thing?
• C3. What's the cheapest possible MVP version of this — and what's the most expensive interpretation? Is the gap between them explicit?

Resolution rule

For each item: does the source (draft + comments + prior phases) unambiguously answer it?

• Yes → cite the exact line/comment.
• No → that's an Open Question (OQ). Surface it.
• "Probably yes but I'm extrapolating" → that's also an OQ. Don't decide for the initiator.

OQ=0 — the suspicious case

If after the checklist you have zero OQs, your phase-completion comment MUST include a Pre-flight review paragraph naming:

• Which items from sections A/B/C you challenged (at least 3 across categories).
• For each: where in the source it was resolved (link to comment / cite section).

Without this paragraph, OQ=0 is treated as failure-to-elicit, not success. Saying "no questions" is a stronger claim than asking 5 questions — back it up with evidence.

Anti-patterns to catch in yourself

• "The initiator already specified..." — re-read. Did they specify, or imply? If implied → ask.
• "This is obvious from context..." — obvious to whom? The system-analyst doesn't have your context.
• "I'll just default to..." — no. Default decisions belong to the initiator, not you.
• "It's a small detail..." — small details from a BA become 3-day re-works for the developer.
• Mirroring the initiator's vocabulary without questioning whether their terms map cleanly to the system. (E.g. initiator says "user" — but there are 3 actor types in the system. Which one?)

Why this skill exists

Research lens for why this matters and why default LLM behaviour fails here:

• Sycophancy (Sharma et al., Anthropic 2023): RLHF-tuned models bias toward agreeing with the user, including agreeing-by-omission (not raising concerns).
• Chain-of-Verification (Dhuliawala et al., Meta 2023): structured self-questioning reduces hallucination 30-50% vs. single-pass generation. The adversarial checklist is CoVe applied to requirements.
• The "motivated junior engineer" failure mode: LLM agents accept ambiguous specs and fill gaps with extrapolation. The fix is explicit invariants ("never decide for the initiator") + output structure that forces deliberation (the OQ=0 justification rule).

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When in doubt

• Read your project's plane-api.md (referenced from $KB_DIR/AGENTS.md) for protocol-level operations.
• Read artifact-templates skill for the canonical REQUIREMENTS structure.
• Don't invent new requirement categories — fit everything into the BABOK 4 types.
• If a question can't be asked clearly with options — the question itself is wrong; refine before asking the initiator.