Business Requirements

I mentioned earlier that our fictional customer requires a simple online time entry and approval system. Let's go into a bit more detail here.

It is always a good idea to define what business problem is being solved, whom it is being solved for, and why our solution is important to the customer. In addition, it is important to understand what the customer's expectations are: for example, when is the solution needed, and what is the project scope.

Let's assume that a fictional organization wants to build a timesheet system to manage its hourly staff. To get things started, we can define the problem statement as follows.

Problem Statement

Our employees currently submit their weekly hours worked using a paper-based timesheet system that is manually intensive and error-prone. We require an automated solution for submitting employee hours worked, in the form of an electronic timesheet, approving them, and paying for the time worked. In addition, we would like to have automatic notifications of timesheet status changes and a weekly reminder to submit and approve employee timesheets.

Given our general problem statement, we can break this down into the following feature set or business requirements; this process could be considered a part of use case analysis, in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) world:

• Hourly employees should be able to sign in to a web application (once or more each week) and enter their hours for each day of a given week. Along with the hours, the employee must select which department the hours are being billed to.

• Employees will be required to submit their timesheets each week.

• An employee's manager is notified of successfully submitted timesheets. The manager must then approve or disapprove the timesheets.

• After a timesheet is approved or disapproved, a notification is sent back to the employee indicating the updated status of the timesheet. If the timesheet is approved, an email is also sent to the accounting department to process the paycheck for the given employee.

• All users of Time Expression will have one or more relevant reports available to them.

• A weekly reminder email will be sent out to employees who have not submitted their timesheets. Another reminder email is sent to managers who have employee timesheets pending approval.

Now that we have some basic business requirements, we can proceed with our software development process.