Mastering the Requirements Process, 4th Edition

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The Brown Cow Model

The Brown Cow model is a way of organizing your thinking. When you’re trawling the problem space, you are working with your customers, your stakeholders, and your team and examining different aspects of the business problem and its solution. The Brown Cow model is a way of compartmentalizing these aspects so that everybody concerned is clear on exactly what is being discussed and what each aspect contributes to understanding the problem and the solution.

Previously, we looked at the essence of the problem. The essence is an abstraction that removes any physical implementation devices to reveal the underlying policy of the business problem. It would be advantageous to have an orderly way of keeping these two viewpoints—how ...