Introduction

The purpose of the Requirements workflow is to engineer the requirements for your project. During the Inception phase, you need to identify the requirements for your software to provide sufficient information for scoping, estimating, and planning your project. To do this, you often need to identify your requirements to the "10 20% level" the point where you understand at a high-level what your project needs to deliver, but may not fully understand the details. You are likely to develop several artifacts as part of your requirements model, including, but not limited, to an essential use-case model (Constantine & Lockwood, 1999; Ambler, 2001), an essential user interface prototype (Constantine & Lockwood, 1999; Ambler, 2001), a user-interface flow diagram (Ambler, 2001), and a supplementary specification (Kruchten, 2000). A supplementary specification is a "catch-all" artifact where you document business rules, constraints, and non-functional requirements. During the Elaboration phase (Ambler & Constantine, 2000a), you will evolve your requirements model to the 80% level and will finalize it during the Construction phase (Ambler & Constantine, 2000b).

Your goal during the Inception phase is to develop your requirements model to the "10 20%" level.

There is much more to the Requirements workflow than simply developing a requirements model. You must also elicit the needs of your project stakeholders so that the overall vision for the project may be negotiated. You should strive to define a common vocabulary by developing a project glossary an artifact that should be started during the Inception phase and evolved throughout...