Boundary conditions are statements about the line between true and false and do and do not. These statements may or may not be meant to include end points. For example, “We want to use method X when there are up to 10 pages, but method Y otherwise.” If you were building this system, would you include page 10 in method X or in method Y? The answer to this question will vary causing an ambiguous business requirement. 15

Questions

1. Why are ambiguous business requirements the leading cause of system development failures?

2. Why do the words  and  and  or  tend to lead to ambiguous requirements?

3. Research the web and determine other reasons for bad business requirements.

4. What is wrong with the following business requirement: “The system must support employee birthdays because every employee always has a birthday every year.”