Business requirements are usually gathered through some combination of informal interviews, formal Joint Application Design (JAD) sessions, or reviewing current system functionality.
The following is a transcript from an informal interview with the President of eGolf Services:
Given the popularity of the Internet and Golf, we see an opportunity to provide golfers with a few simple online golf services. In exchange for these services, we hope to generate enough hits to our Website to allow us to eventually sell banner-advertising space to the golfing industry.
The first service we are going to provide is the calculation of a golfer's Handicap Index, which is an indicator of a player's potential scoring ability on a course of standard difficulty. A player would look up their actual Handicap for a particular Course by cross-referencing their Handicap Index against that Course's Handicap Table.
To accurately calculate a golfer's Handicap Index, we need to know scores of their most recent 20 golf games. Five games can be used for new golfers. In addition, we need to know the Rating and Slope Rating for the course the game was played on.
The way we see this service working is that the golfers will first register with us for the service. It will be free of charge, requiring them to enter only a few facts about themselves, like user ID, password, name, and email address. Thereafter, they can login and enter their scores, and we will then recalculate their Handicap Index based on their most recent entries.
As Analysts, we would review the information obtained through the interview, looking for Entities/Entity Types (things of interest to the business) and Processes (what the business intends to do with these things). Entity Types are documented in the Data Model Diagram (often named as the Entity Relationship Diagram), while the business Processes are documented in the Activity Hierarchy Diagram.
As one can expect, there is (or should be) a correspondence between these two diagrams. From the previous interview, one of the things the business intends to do is to Calculate Golfer Handicap Index. This would be documented in the Activity Hierarchy Diagram. Likewise, it should be reasonably clear that one of the things of interest to the business should be the Golfer, and the Golfer would be documented in the Data Model Diagram. We will discuss each of these diagrams in more detail in the next few sections.
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