Business Requirements

[James Barrow]

That's the thing, John, there aren't really any business requirements at
all.  The A1 app was concocted and developed with executive VPs stopping by
periodically and telling the developers, "Oh yeah, Ted wants A1 to callout
xyz from Widget database."

-----Original Message-----
From: John Posada [mailto:jposada01 at yahoo.com] 


> If you don't know what your business requirements are, why are you
> in business?

A business requirements document is the business requirements for the
product. It's not a company business plan. Besides...not knowing the
busines requirements and not having a Business Requirements document
is two different things. For instance, we use Rational's ClearQuest
to track bugs and to track feature request. At any time, anyone can
query and print the feature requests for a particular product. In
effect, the output of that query could be considered the Business
Requirements material if your justification for features is customer
driven. If you are government driven, the Business Requirements
document could be a new law. I'd go so far as to say SOX legislation
was a Business Requirements document for the accounting and auditing
section of your company.

> If there are no business requirements, why have
> application/development requirements?

Nobody ever said there were no business requirements...there just
isn't a document defining them. It may be that before the writer got
involved, there were a string of meetings and a slew of emails
hammering out each feature.

Too many of us are:

1) too process-regimented. You can get results without going through
the exact process we want, and
2) think the company revolves around us; no content is acceptable
unless written or reviewed by us, and no process is valid unless the
process meets with our expectations and requirements.