BI Requirements Gathering: Leveraging What Exists by Jonathan G. Geiger.
From the post:
Analysis of Existing Queries and Reports
Businesspeople who are looking for business intelligence capabilities typically are not starting from a clean slate. Over time, they have established a series queries and reports that are executed on an ad hoc or regular basis. These reports contain data that they receive and purportedly use. Understanding these provides both advantages and disadvantages when gathering requirements. The major advantage is that using the existing deliverables helps to provide a basis for discussion. Commenting on something concrete is easier than generating new ideas. With the existing reports in hand, key questions to ask include:
This post includes references to Jonathan’s posts on interviewing and facilitation.
These posts are great guides to use in developing BI requirements. Your circumstances will vary so you will need to adapt these techniques to your particular circumstances. But they are a great starting place.
If your programmers object to requirements gathering because of their “methodology,” I suggest you point them to: Top Ten Reasons Systems Projects Fail by Dr. Paul Dorsey. Or you can search for “project failure rate” and pick any other collection about project failure.
You will not find a single study that points to adequate requirements as a reason for project failure. Quite often inadequate requirements are mentioned but never the contrary. Suspect there is a lesson there. Can you guess what it is?