For those who would like to see a sample requirements document, with use cases sketched out at several levels, I posted one as the Oct 11, 98 update at http://members.aol.com/acockburn (can now be found at http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Sample_system_requirements_document ). I got many of the non-obvious questions from the requirements document template posted by SuzanneRobertson of the AtlanticSystemsGuild. However, hers had 36 chapters, and while thorough, was too intimidating to fill out on a less-than-critical project. So I abridged that and put it into a form I would be willing to stand working with. You will see it is still fairly intimidating for a casual project, but has some interesting questions for any project's starting staff to ponder. I am thinking of moving the use cases to the end, since they form most of the bulk. Comments welcome (that's why I posted the document and this note) --AlistairCockburn ---- To present an alternative to Alistair's Requirements doc (which looks pretty good), this outline is based loosely on the IEEE Standard. 830-1998 IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements Specifications. '''Software Requirements Specification (SRS)''' 1 Introduction * Purpose of the system * Scope of the system * Definitions, acronyms, and abbreviations * References * Overview 2 Overall Description * Product perspective * Product functions * User characteristics * Constraints * Assumptions and dependencies 3 Specific requirements * External interface requirements * User interfaces * Hardware interfaces * Software interfaces * Communications interfaces * Functional requirements * Performance requirements * Design constraints * Software system attributes * Other requirements * Appendixes * Index It's pretty basic, and isn't perfectly tailored to XP, but seems to form the basis of most requirements specifications that I've seen. -- DaveBeer ---- See also anecdote about TypesOfProjects ---- CategoryRequirements