Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Reporting with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

3.2. Gathering Requirements for Reports

Once your client has seen what can be done with SSRS, the next thing is to understand the client's requirements. Gathering requirements is the most important part of planning because the information collected in this phase will allow you to determine how the report will work and how it will look and feel. So where do you begin? What do you ask the client when gathering requirements? One of the things I hear over and over again is that there is really not a good requirements-gathering template for reports. As reports are an area where business analysts need a database background, organizations generally end up using developers to gather business requirements.

The goal of this section is to help business analysts and business users learn what questions to ask when collecting requirements without needing to know much about databases and development. Using the topics discussed in this section, a business analyst will be able to create a detailed functional design document that will allow developers to create exactly what the client needs.

So let's start gathering requirements for a report project.

3.2.1. Naming Your Report

You should start your requirements-gathering session by naming your report. Assuming that you have a list of reports stored in a SharePoint document library, the name is the first thing the business user will see. So which report do they need? You don't want them to click through all of the reports in the document library ...