Engineering Software Products: An Introduction to Modern Software Engineering

3.4 Feature identification

As I said in the chapter introduction, your aim at this early stage of product design is to create a list of features that define your software product. A feature is a way of allowing users to access and use your product’s functionality so that the feature list defines the overall functionality of the system. In this section, I explain how scenarios and stories can be used to help identify product features.

You should, ideally, identify product features that are independent, coherent and relevant:

1. Independence A feature should not depend on how other system features are implemented and should not be affected by the order of activation of other features.

2. Coherence Features should be linked to a single item of functionality. ...