Requirements Definition

Business requirements capture involves understanding and recording of the full set of business requirements for a new or modified software application, modelling those requirements e.g. with use cases and breaking broad functionality descriptions into atomic requirements, taking into account conflicting needs of stakeholders and users.  The resulting output from this process is a complete description of the behaviour of the resulting software and its non-functional requirements (for example: performance needs, design constraints, standards required).

The cost of fixing incomplete requirements increases dramatically after this stage and hence software requirements capture is critical to the success of a development project.  Changing a requirement is many times less expensive than changing the completed software.