publications events
Translate business requirements and user requirements into features, and then prioritize them.
a. The best teams develop a features specification, which flows from the business requirements document(s) and the user requirements document(s).
• Business requirements are most often stated as high level end goals than as specific features. For example, a business goal may be to personalize an application by identifying the user by name. A feature specification describes this more specifically, such as:
> User's name will appear on every page.
> User's title, when available, will appear with user's name.
• User requirements are most often stated as wants, needs, or wishes. For example, a user requirement might be that they want more ability to reuse a report they'd previously created. A feature specification describes this more specifically, such as:
> User can “Save Report as Template.”
> User can “Select from List of Templates.”
> User can “Rename Template.”
b. The best teams prioritize the features based on rankings from three sources: business, users, and IT. The input is typically in the form of numeric ranking; in order of importance from business and users, and in order of doablility from IT.
• Combining or averaging input from all three ranking sources is a very effective way of determining the optimum feature mix for the application.
• Giving users a place in the prioritization process insures that the features important to users make it into the application. The end users themselves do not rank the features but members of the team who are closest to the users (such as the BA(s) or UI Developer(s)) provide input from their perspective.