Definitions of Common Software Requirements Terms

Business analysis and requirements are all about communication, so let’s agree on our terminology.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko

I’ve taught hundreds of classes on software requirements. The first thing I must do in each class is establish a common vocabulary. Students coming from different backgrounds have different notions of what various terms used in the requirements domain mean. One person’s user story is another’s functional requirement, use case, feature, scenario, or simply “requirement.” It gets confusing.

To reduce that confusion, here are definitions of 70 terms that business analysts and requirements engineers frequently encounter regarding their activities and the deliverables they create. These are adapted from my book Software Requirements, 3rd Edition, with coauthor Joy Beatty. I’ve provided links to articles where you can get more information about many of the topics.

acceptance criteria: Conditions that a product must satisfy to be accepted by a user, customer, or other stakeholder. Used in agile software development both to express details about a user story and to determine whether a user story is fully and correctly implemented.

acceptance test: A test that evaluates an anticipated usage scenario to determine the product’s…