Business Stakeholders: How to Describe a Software FEATURE

A feature from the biz perspective

What is a feature?
A feature is an aspect of software that is useful. Anything you can express, that is possible, and that you can afford, can be a feature. A bug is an aspect of software that isn’t useful.

Since we’re talking about development, we’re discussing software features that don’t exist yet. These are features that we would like to build, or existing features that we would like to make better. Describe a feature with should statements:

  • It should email all the clients once a month.
  • The client should have a setting page in the admin area.
  • The plugin should have a custom post type called GPS coordinates for each subscriber.
  • The div should show a timeline of Civil War battles in the footer area.

The next statement you should create is the reason for the feature you are requesting. What is the business value of this feature? Describe the reason by using a “Because”, or “So that” .

  • So that the clients are routinely updated.
  • So that the user can change the settings.
  • Because we need to store the GPS data.

Alternatively, you can use Gherkin syntax for feature development.

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