Documenting and Managing Requirements
This is a detailed how-to guide to ensuring your requirements are fully captured. It is a useful guidebook with processes you will tweak and adapt to each project plan. Is anything surprising or new to you? You will not use all of these approaches for every project, but having them at hand is useful when planning your next project.
Requirements Development
Business Rules
There is a common misconception that business rules are requirements. While there may be a one-to-one correspondence between the two, there is a distinction between them. Requirements describe what is needed to implement the business rules. Business rules themselves describe how the business must operate. The following table provides a comparison.
| Business Rule | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Customers may reserve an appointment by scheduling a date and time to meet with a representative of the department. | • The public facing web site will display a phone number customers may call to reserve an appointment.
• The public facing web site will allow customers to navigate to an appointment reservation request form. |
| Failure to pay the fee by the due date will result in a .02% penalty charge to the customer. | • The application will automatically determine when a customer fee is overdue based on the current date and the receivable due date.
• When a customer fee is overdue, the application will calculate and update the penalty amount on the customer receivable record. |
Many organizations actively manage their business rules. There are also many organizations where the rules are embedded in the policies and procedures used to guide operations. Many procedures are not captured in any document, but reside within the staff knowledge-base. Regardless of which environment you are working in, the business rules affecting your project should be identified to ensure that your project deliverables support overall operations.
| Business Rules (BABOK v2.0) |
|---|
| • Define or constrain some aspect of the business |
| • Apply across processes and procedures (system agnostic) |
| • Intended to assert business structure or control/influence the behavior of the business |
| • Rules are atomic – that is, they cannot be broken down |
For those organizations that effectively manage their business rules, understanding them is fairly straightforward. Where an organization does not formally manage the rules, you will need to perform analysis to identify the rules. Understanding applicable policies and procedures, and accepted IT and Security standards, prepares you to ensure that the requirements expressed by your users comply with business operations that must be supported by the project deliverable.