Question

Clearly compare business Objectives, System Requirements, and Design choices. Use one example of an information problem from your application.

Answer 1

A vision (also known as business objective) is typically a high level view of what you ultimately want to achieve as a result of the project. You would use it to describe the project, identify stakeholders, define success criteria, and goals and priorities. You may also use such a thing to begin to define the most important assumptions, dependencies, constraints, and risks.

In Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, Geoffrey Moore presented this template for a vision statement, that would be the most minimal format for a project vision:

For {target customer or user} who {statement of need}, the {product} is a {product category} that {key benefit(s)}, unlike {current state, alternatives}. Unlike {competitors or current state}, our product {primary differentiation and advantages}.

From a vision, scope, or charter, you develop requirements. A requirement is a statement of need of the product or process that is being developed. There are several qualities of a good requirement: cohesive, complete, consistent, atomic, traceable, current, unambiguous, specify importance, and verifiable. A requirement could appear in multiple formats, from a more traditional shall statement ("the system shall compute the distance between two points to an accuracy of no less than 6 inches") to a user story ("as a buyer, I want to be able to add one or more items to my shopping cart for later purchase").

A requirements specification is the set of requirements that a system is to fulfill. Customers and users may have many requirements, but some may not be fulfilled by the system. In a complete system, you can look at its requirements specification as a list of its characteristics. In a system under development, it is the intention for the next milestone.

A design indicates how the requirements specification will be realized. It's a model, simulation, prototype, or other conceptualization of a system. It provides details as to how each requirement will be met and how pieces of the system interact with each other. Sometimes, however the final design is captured is referred to as the system's design specification - this is exactly how the system is to be instantiated by the creators.

The formality, ceremony, and types of artifacts produced for each of these depends on your product development lifecycle, engineering methodology, and project complexity.