Most of the time, the reports and analysis are already being developed by the business users fully or partially, on some or the other tool. While doing this, they may have some documentation which explains the entire process of the report development, including the data sources and the logic applied in the reports. Understanding such documentation is nothing but gathering requirements by document analysis.

Document analysis is one of the good ways of gathering the requirements, because it already has all the information which one should have in order to develop that requirement in a new tool. Such documents become important content, because they help the consultant to understand the current process of the report generation. This further helps the consultant to seek the optimized way to develop requirements and enable the business users to get good amount of analysis from them.

Another advantage of doing the requirement gathering by analyzing the document is that the consultant need not start everything from scratch. They can easily understand the document and get the required information in a much shorter time.

This type of requirement gathering can become complex when the documents are not updated. In such cases, it becomes complicated for the consultant relate to the documents with the actual reporting. Thus, if the documentations are not being updated regularly or when changes have been made, then they cannot be leveraged to the maximum.