Analyzing Requirements and Identifying Initial Themes

Once again, we have a set of numbered requirements (given in Table 8-1). This time, the requirements are broken up explicitly by feature: menu, alerts and rings, voice call, SMS, game, and a media player feature. We've gone through these requirements and bolded the key concepts that we initially believe will be our themes.

Table 8-1. List of Phone Feature Requirements

Feature	Requirements
Menu	R1: The menu consists of several options: make a voice call, write an SMS, use the media player, play a game. R2: A user can scroll through the menu and select an item to start.
Alerts and Rings	R3: Ringing is used to signal an incoming voice call. R4: Alerts are used to signal an incoming SMS. R5: When alerts and rings occur, other audio (media player, voice call, game sounds) is momentarily muted but not paused.
Voice Call	R6: When a voice call occurs, other activities (media player, game, SMS edit) are paused, and their state saved, to be resumed when the call ends.
SMS	R7: A user can send and edit an SMS from within the SMS application.
Game	R8: A user can play, pause, save, and exit a game session.
Media Player	R9: The media player has several functions: play audio, record audio, radio, memo play, and memo record. R10: The media player can start, stop, pause, and resume all those functions.

A quick look at these theme names flags for us that some of them might be too general. For instance, there are two save themes, which are behaviorally quite different (saving a game, from R8, and saving the state of a preempted activity, from R6). It would be inappropriate to group requirements related to both senses of save. To remedy ambiguities such as these, you can split the themes to make them more specific. Table 8-2 lists the new theme names.

Table 8-2. Themes Names Split into More Specific Names

Original	Split Themes
save	audio-save (R6), game-save (R8)
pause	audio-pause (R6), game-pause (R8), media-pause (R10)
start	media-start (R10), menu-start (R2)
play	media-play (R10), game-play (R8)
signal	signal call (R3), signal sms (R4)

To complete the split, we also have to attach the requirements with the correct themes, since the lexical matching will not link the requirements to the new theme names. The requirement numbers in parentheses show the requirement attached to each new theme.