Business Requirements

[James Barrow]

>John Rosberg said:
>>John Posada wrote:
>>>Jim Barrow said:
>>>
>>>At the moment I'm putting together a brief memo that details the
>>>importance of establishing business requirements before starting the A2
>>>project, and establishing at least some business requirements for the
>>>legacy app.  Do you agree?  Disagree?  Why?
>>
>>I totally agree that you need business requirements on your A2 project.
>>Not so sure about the legacy app unless you plan on doing some new
>>development for it.
>
>I don't consider Busness Requirements (BR) as important as Functional
>Requirements (FS), except to write the FS, and if whoever is writing the FS
>thinks they don't need the BR, maybe they do and maybe they don't. It could
>be that the person writing the FS knows that business and its requirements
>very well. Once you have the FS, you are writing about the application that
>conforms to those requrements.

Doesn't this depend on the audience?  Developers really don't care about
'why' an application needs to be developed.  Maybe thorough developers would
read business requirements to get an idea of what stakeholders had in mind
when they sat down and first brain-stormed, but I think they would only want
to know 'how' an application is expected to function.

Business units (stakeholders), on the other hand, want to see this same
information one level higher.  They don't want to read how the A2 app does
what it does, they want to know why they've invested their resources in the
first place i.e., "The IT department needs to send and receive files
electronically").

The functional requirement of this would be "The A1 system will provide FTP
functionality..."