Where Do You Start?

The amount of effort required to define the right system varies tremendously. Depending on what impact new software systems have on your business, the analysis of the business operation may be anything from a large-scale business re-engineering effort to a minimal research effort. Let's look at a couple of different situations:

• Business NOT well understood . You first need to understand the business before you build the supporting software. This is when you need to do business engineering. Business engineering is a big field ”we will summarize only a small area of it called business modeling . ^[1] The next section, Understand How Your Business Should Operate, briefly describes business modeling and how to translate business models into software requirements.

  ^[1] For a more complete description of the RUP's approach to business engineering, see Jacobson 1994.

• Business well understood. Most applications are developed to support an existing, and well-understood, business. In this case, an analyst would commence working as described in the following sections, Understand Stakeholder Needs and Develop a Vision.