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This “Project Background” section contains a summary of all the notes that pertain to the
background of the project. It contains these subsections:

Purpose of the project
Every stakeholder and user has a reason that the software should be developed. This
section should contain a summary of each of those reasons. The goal is to give the
reader an understanding of why these people need the system to be developed.
Scope of the project
The vision and scope document described the scope of the software to be developed, by
listing each feature that would be included. This section should go into greater detail, elab-
orating on each feature by listing specific behaviors and tasks the software will perform.
Other background information
This section should contain any additional information that may help a reader under-
stand why the system is needed. (Additionally, most of the notes that don’t fit any-
where else in the discussion summary can go into this section.)
The “Perspectives” section is used to identify the people who will help define the behavior of
the software. Each person’s perspective should be taken into account. Some of these per-
spectives may conflict with each other; that’s okay, as long as they are described accurately.
These conflicts will be worked out later, when the behavior is described in the use cases. This
section must provide/contain answers to the following key questions:
Who will use the system?
The people who will be using the software should be divided into categories. Each cate-
gory of users should have a unique name (“Salesperson”) and description (“A member of
the North America sales team who will be selling the software in a specific territory.“).
The names that are given to the categories of users should make sense to people in the
organization—most organizations have their own names for different roles or positions,
and the requirements analyst should use that terminology wherever possible. The analyst
will have many notes that pertain to each of these categories. They should be divided up
by category and summarized in this section.
Who can provide input about the system?

The organization contains many people who can provide some input about the system
to be developed. This section should list everyone who was consulted about the system
behavior, and summarize any notes that describe the needs of each one.

The “Project objectives” section summarizes the information that was gathered in the elic-
itation phase, such as the functionality that the software must implement, the work cur-
rently being done or planned in the organization that will be affected or augmented by the
software, and any constraints that must be taken into account. This section contains:

Known business rules
This section should contain details of any procedures that are currently being performed
or that are needed in the organization and that will affect the software. The section
should indicate who is involved or will be affected.

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