Business Requirements Overview

Business requirements outline what a project needs to achieve and any limitations it must work within from both a business and user perspective. They can help guide the project from the beginning, measure its readiness, or clarify the final commitments to the client or project owner, depending on your team’s process.

Using business requirements isn't always necessary. For example, small teams working on their own product may choose not to use them and switch off business requirement artifact in project settings.

Business requirements usually don’t cover specific details like the design of the user interface or data specifications. These are usually detailed in other documents, such as software requirements and specifications.

Describing Business Requirements

Business requirements can be described using:

• Text descriptions
• Files uploaded from the user’s computer
• Diagrams created using a built-in editor
• Files from external services, like Google Docs or Figma frames

Requirement Classification

• Type: The type of business requirement, based on pre-configured types.
• Subsystems: The subsystems affected by the business requirements. Multiple selections allowed.
• Actors: The actors/user roles interacting with the system in the context of high-level requirements. Multiple selections allowed.
• Folder: Requirements can be organized in nested folders.
• Priority: The importance of the requirement.
• Labels: Tags to help identify and sort the requirements.
• Custom Classifiers: User-defined classifiers can be used for additional classification of requirements.

Business Requirement Types

Depending on how you gather requirements, you can define different types of business requirements, such as:

• Goals: The objectives and needs of the client or project owner.
• Use Cases: Scenarios that show how users interact with the system to get a positive outcome.
• User Stories: Brief descriptions of what users need from the system, often used in agile development.
• Business Rules: Rules that must be considered when designing and building the system.
• Constraints: Limitations that could affect how the requirements are implemented.
• Other Types: You can create other types based on your company’s process.

Linking Business Requirements

Business requirements can be connected to each other, depending on how they relate or impact one another.

Links to Other Artifacts

The specific details for implementing business requirements are described in software requirements. These are linked to detailed artifacts like user interface designs, data model entities, API methods, etc.

Almware supports the following types of links for business requirements:

• Business Requirements: Links between different business requirements, showing how they are related. This is useful if one requirement impacts others, includes, or extends them.
• Software Requirements: Links to software requirements that implement business requirements.