← Business and Systems Analysis from Scratch
Lesson
Requirement levels: from business need to system function
The learner can sort requirements into levels: business requirements → stakeholder requirements → solution requirements (functional + non-functional) → transition requirements.
The four requirement levels (BABOK)
From 'why' to 'how': the BABOK requirement hierarchy
Requirements don't all live on the same floor. BABOK (the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) organises them into four levels, each answering a different question.
Business requirements answer 'Why are we doing this?' They capture the organisation's goal or problem — for example, 'Reduce customer churn by 15% within one year.' No technology is mentioned here.
Stakeholder requirements answer 'What does each user group need?' They sit one level down and describe what a person or role must be able to do to help the business reach its goal — for example, 'A customer support agent must be able to view a customer's full order history on one screen.'
Solution requirements answer 'What must the system do, and how well must it do it?' They split into two sub-types. Functional requirements (FR) describe a specific behaviour the system must perform — 'The system shall display the last 12 months of orders, sorted by date.' Non-functional requirements (NFR) set quality constraints — performance, security, usability, reliability — for example, 'The order history page shall load within 2 seconds for 95% of requests.' Both FR and NFR are sub-types of the solution level.
Transition requirements answer 'What do we need only to get from the current state to the future state?' They cover things like data migration scripts and staff training materials. Once the go-live is complete, transition requirements are discarded — they have no permanent value.
Lesson notes
From 'why' to 'how': the BABOK requirement hierarchy
Requirements don't all live on the same floor. BABOK (the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) organises them into four levels, each answering a different question.
Business requirements answer 'Why are we doing this?' They capture the organisation's goal or problem — for example, 'Reduce customer churn by 15% within one year.' No technology is mentioned here.
Stakeholder requirements answer 'What does each user group need?' They sit one level down and describe what a person or role must be able to do to help the business reach its goal — for example, 'A customer support agent must be able to view a customer's full order history on one screen.'
Solution requirements answer 'What must the system do, and how well must it do it?' They split into two sub-types. Functional requirements (FR) describe a specific behaviour the system must perform — 'The system shall display the last 12 months of orders, sorted by date.' Non-functional requirements (NFR) set quality constraints — performance, security, usability, reliability — for example, 'The order history page shall load within 2 seconds for 95% of requests.' Both FR and NFR are sub-types of the solution level.
Transition requirements answer 'What do we need only to get from the current state to the future state?' They cover things like data migration scripts and staff training materials. Once the go-live is complete, transition requirements are discarded — they have no permanent value.