Implementing SOA: Total Architecture in Practice

Chapter 8. The Artifice of Requirements

The intent of requirements is to specify the compulsory aspects of a design. The thought is that you first specify what your project’s business processes and systems must do, and then you design and implement them. However, merely identifying these business processes and systems reflects a higher-level design. This design differentiates the design elements—the business processes and systems your project will build or modify—from the context in which they reside. It also defines the required interactions between the design elements and their context. Thus the requirements for the design elements are actually reflections of this high-level design. They define the existence of certain design elements and ...