So now we have Sven, who as can be seen in the last article, is a successful software developer. He has created a game, Blastoid, which went viral and has been a big enough success that he has been able to create a company based around supporting it. While the game is still popular, Sven and his team know that they need to get to work on the follow-up release to keep riding that wave. With this in mind he has called the management team together to brainstorm ideas of what to do.
They come up with the idea of a new challenge for the mining entrepreneurs of asteroid mining. The brainstorming session settles on Mars as the next place to put the game. With the growth of technologies in the time since the original Blastoid was released, the team decides that state of the art graphics are needed. These details are to be coupled with a physics engine that is capable of replicating the real world, tweaked for the extra-planetary environments. The details of these can be gathered from current scientific data and implemented. Much of the team also feels that the time is right to support virtual reality devices for the game.
Another idea that is considered is to add a co-operative on-line experience to the game. This will include an economy which is modeled on the methods of how the real world economies work. Each player working to maximize profits from their enterprise. One of the money makers for the company will be the ships, part for which will be only available from the central repository maintained by the company with access granted through levels and DLC micro-purchases.
In the end the management team delivers a list of things that they want in the game to the developers working on it. Before it can actually be built however, the business analyst has to go through them and decompose these need statements into requirements. The functional requirements will be the blueprint for the developers to build from. This will ensure that the schedule and budget is kept and the release will happen when desired.
So lets look at the requirements delivered to the BA from the concept team:
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- Mining and mineral discovery on Mars
- Modern Graphics
- Real World Physics
- Virtual Reality support
- Massively Multi-player Online support
- Virtual Economies of Scale
- Centralized control of space vehicle technologies
- Active player markets
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In the V-Model of the system development the team has just completed the Conception phase. At this point the Systems Engineer / Business Analyst will take over. The second phase of system development is requirements definition. The business analyst will begin this phase by performing the decomposition of these need statements and create a Requirements Document which will be the official and approved repository. This document will also serve as the guide for development of the product. Depending on the business methodology used for development, waterfall or agile, this will either be a fully detailed document or little more than the requirements traceability matrix.