Summary

The process of gathering and analyzing business requirements consists of two specific phases: analyzing the current business state and analyzing business requirements for the solution. You start the business requirements-gathering phase with an analysis of the current business state so that you have a definition of the organization's current status. Determining the gap between where the organization is now (the current business state) and where the organization wants to be (the desired business state) makes it clearer what steps you need to complete to get to the desired business state.

The second part of this chapter dealt with analyzing the business requirements needed for the solution. The first step is to determine the features users want and then use these features to determine the actual requirements. After gathering the requirements, you must identify any dependencies or constraints that could affect the project. Next, you need to determine the data requirements. Finally, you should graphically represent the system requirements with data flow diagrams.