Application Vision Statement

Definition

Application Vision Statement: the requirements work product produced during application development that documents the customer organization’s vision of a single application under development

The typical objectives of an application vision statement are to:

Document the results of the application visioning task.
Document the definition and mission of the application.
Document the business problems to be solved by the application and the business opportunities that the application is to take advantage of.
Document the major needs of the application’s stakeholders.
List the business, functional, data, and quality goals of the application.
List any known constraints (e.g., business rules) on the application.

The typical benefits of the application vision statement are:

It ensures that a consensus regarding the mission, goals, and constraints of the application is developed between the customer organization and the development organization.
It provides a foundation upon which to develop the remainder of the requirements specifications, especially the system requirements specification.

The typical contents of an application vision statement are:

Application Overview:
- Application Definition
- Application Mission
- Business Opportunities and Challenges
Stakeholders:
- Stakeholder Needs
Business Goals:
- Financial Goals:
  - Development Costs
  - Maintenance Costs
  - Profit
  - Return on Investment (ROI)
- Market Goals:
  - Market Share
  - Time to Market
  - Brand Loyalty
- User Goals:
  - High Usage
  - User Productivity
  - User Satisfaction
Functional Goals:
- Major Features (a.k.a., Feature Set)
- Prioritization of these Features
- Desired Schedule of Feature Delivery
Data (Information, Content) Goals
Quality Goals
Constraints:
- Business Rules
- Business Constraints
- Data, Hardware, and Software Constraints
- Industry Standards
- Legal and Regulatory Constraints
Appendices:
- Envisioned Future Enhancements
- Major Issues
- TBDs
- Assumptions

The typical stakeholders of an application vision statement are:

Producers:
- Requirements Team
Evaluators:
- Requirements Inspection Team
- Customer Organization, which inspects the content for correctness
Approvers:
Maintainer:
- Requirements Team
Users:
- Requirements Team, which uses it as a source of requirements.
- Project Team, which uses it to understand the application from a business, customer viewpoint.

An application vision statement is typically produced during the following phases:

The application vision statement can be started if the following preconditions hold:

The initiation phase is started.
The requirements team has been staffed and trained in application visioning.
Customer representatives, marketing representatives, user representatives, and business domain experts (e.g., industry analysts) are available to work with the requirements team to establish the application’ mission, feature set, and goals.

The typical inputs to the application vision statement include:

Work Products:
Stakeholders:
- Customer Representatives
- Marketing Representatives
- User Representatives
- Business Domain Experts (e.g., industry analysts)

This is a living document that is incrementally and iteratively developed and maintained in parallel with other documents.
This document is at a higher level of abstraction than (and a major source of content for) the system requirements specification.

The application vision statement is typically constrained by the following conventions: