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New Post 12/1/2015 7:05 AM
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User is offline opposer
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How to organize Features and Business Rules for further discussions? 
Hi everybody. 
Here is my task.
The company, where yesterday was my first day, is developing a software, and it's partially complete. I'm first analyst here, and before hiring me theydiscussed all the requirements orally and didn't store them, so there is no any project documentation. So they gave me a task to organize all the features that are already released - into knowledge base, so they could discuss and add new functionality being able to see all that is done before. They want to prevent features conflicts also. 
So we had a workshop with teamlead and project manager, I extracted tons of facts about the software - about its features and business rules, which they conform to. I've organized user features into hierarchy and business rules among them  My idea is to organize the user features and business rules into one mindmap, so they could see them all when discussing new features.

Are there any better ways to organize this knowledge base? I wanted to organize features into a fishbone diagram, but how can I add business rules into it? Mark business rules somehow? Or are there any better ways to organize business rules and features?
 
New Post 12/10/2015 11:10 AM
User is offline Chris Adams
323 posts
5th Level Poster






Re: How to organize Features and Business Rules for further discussions? 

It sounds like you have pretty good handle on the features and business rules given where you started.  My main piece of advice is to map the features and business rules back to a requirement.  All features originate from a need.  Feature conflicts arise when a feature conflicts with a requirement or when it isn't the best way to satisfy that requirement.  

This process doesn't have to be too fancy or complex. I would take a somewhat agile approach to start. Create 1-3 sentence user stories representing each requirement.  Then map each feature to one or more user stories. And of course features can also have sub-features (your fishbone diagram).  I've written about a common method for creating user stories in our interview questions.

Using this technique, you capture the requirement in 1-3 sentences and then you document the acceptance tests on the back of the "card".  The back of the card is also a great place to capture specific business rules too!  Of course, here I'm discussing physical index cards for the sake of an example, but you can represent all of this in a database with fields for each or in a word document. 

The main takeaway...map to requirements.  Hope this helps.


Chris Adams
Core Member – ModernAnalyst.com
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