We should probably talk about constraints, and how they affect certain aspects of business analysis, namely requirements documents. The context of this discussion will be software application development.
A constraint is “a limitation or restriction.”
Typically, as a business analyst, there is a section of each document that is called “Constraints” and it has a list of items that the audience of the document needs to remember as they read it because they have a
direct impact on the application that will be developed. This article is not about those constraints.
I do believe there are some constraints that get forgotten about, and those are the ones around the documents themselves.
In my opinion, which I invite you to counter, certain documents have constraints which are necessary to ensure that the document fulfills its purpose. As an example, a constraint of a requirements document is
that it is not a “living” document. Design, by comparison, is a “living” document.
