Artifact: Vision
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The Vision is a general vision of the core project's requirements, and provides the contractual basis for the more detailed technical requirements. |
| Worker: | System Analyst |
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Purpose 
The Vision document provides a high-levelûsometimes contractualûbasis for the more detailed technical requirements. There can also be a formal requirements specification. The Vision captures very high-level requirements and design constraints, to give the reader an understanding of the system to be developed. It provides input to the project-approval process, and is therefore intimately related to the Business Case. It communicates the fundamental "why's and what's" related to the project and is a gauge against which all future decisions should be validated.
The Vision document will be read by managers, funding authorities, workers in use-case modeling, and developers in general.
Brief
Outline
(hyperlinks into HTML template in a new window)
1. Introduction
1.1 Purpose
1.2 Scope
1.3 Definitions, Acronyms and Abbreviations
1.4 References
1.5 Overview
2. Positioning
2.1 Business Opportunity
2.2 Problem Statement
2.3 Product Position Statement
3. Stakeholder and User Descriptions
3.1 Market Demographics
3.2 Stakeholder Summary
3.3 User Summary
3.4 User environment
3.5 Stakeholder Profiles
3.5.1 <Stakeholder Name>
3.6 User Profiles
3.6.1 <User Name>
3.7 Key Stakeholder / User Needs
3.8 Alternatives and Competition
3.8.1 <aCompetitor>
3.8.2 <anotherCompetitor>
4. Product Overview
4.1 Product Perspective
4.2 Summary of Capabilities
4.3 Assumptions and Dependencies
4.4 Cost and Pricing
4.5 Licensing and Installation
5. Product Features
5.1 <aFeature>
5.2 <anotherFeature>
6. Constraints
7. Quality Ranges
8. Precedence and Priority
9. Other Product Requirements
9.1 Applicable Standards
9.2 System Requirements
9.3 Performance Requirements
9.4 Environmental Requirements
10. Documentation Requirements
10.1 User Manual
10.2 Online Help
10.3 Installation Guides, Configuration, Read Me File
10.4 Labeling and Packaging
11. Appendix 1 - Feature Attributes
11.1 Status
11.2 Benefit
11.3 Effort
11.4 Risk
11.5 Stability
11.6 Target Release
11.7 Assigned To
11.8 Reason
Timing
The Vision document is created early in the inception phase, and it is used as a basis for the Business Case (see Artifact: Business Case) and the first draft of the Risk List (see Artifact: Risk List).
The Vision document serves as input to use-case modeling, and is updated and maintained as a separate artifact throughout the project.
Responsibility
A system analyst is responsible for the integrity of the Vision document, ensuring that:
- The Vision document is updated and distributed.
- Input from all concerned stakeholders is addressed.
Additional Information
A project vision is meant to be changeable as the understanding of requirements, architecture, plans, and technology evolves. However, it should be changing slowly and normally throughout the earlier portion of the lifecycle.
It is important to express the vision in terms of its use cases and primary scenarios as these are developed, so that you can see how the vision is realized by the use cases. The use cases also provide an effective basis for evolving a test case suite.
The original author can be anybody, but when the project is established the Vision is under the responsibility of the system analyst.
Another name used for this document is the Product Requirement Document.
