Artifact: Glossary

This artifact defines important terms used by the project. It defines the meaning of all relevant terms to the system being built. These terms are the foundation for all requirements specifications.

Domain: Requirements
Work Product Kinds: Specification

Purpose

The goal is for the Glossary to provide a common vocabulary agreed upon by all Stakeholders. It can help people from different functional groups reach a mutual understanding of the system. The goal is not to record all possible terms, but only those that are unclear, ambiguous, or require elaboration.

Relationships

Roles	Responsible: Analyst	Modified By: Analyst
Tasks	Input To: Analyze Architectural Requirements Detail Requirements Find and Outline Requirements	Output From: Define Vision Detail Requirements Find and Outline Requirements

Description

Main Description

The Glossary helps you avoid miscommunication by providing two essential resources:

A central location to look for terms and abbreviations that are new to development team members
Definitions of terms that are used in specific ways within the domain

Definitions for the Glossary terms come from several sources, such as requirements documents, specifications, and discussions with Stakeholders and domain experts.

Key Considerations

In some projects that do not involve business or domain modeling, the Glossary is the primary artifact for capturing information about the project's business domain.

Tailoring

Impact of not having	Misunderstandings about the meanings of data items account for many failed projects. Some of them become obvious only in the late stages of system testing and can be extremely expensive to correct.
Representation Options	The Glossary is a simple listing of domain terms and their definitions. You can publish this list on a Wiki site to simplify access and maintenance.

This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the
Eclipse Public License v1.0 which accompanies this distribution.