Modeling requirements with impact maps
In Chapter 1, The Requirements Domain, we learned how to identify stakeholders and goals. This is a crucial step in our analysis process, but in order to store and share our analytical findings, we must be able to represent these entities and their associations in a simple yet understandable manner. In other words, we want to model our requirement entities, and a great way of doing that is by using impact maps.
Introduction to impact mapping
Back in 2012, Gojko Adjiz defined the concept of impact maps, a technique that he evolved from UX-based effect-mapping methods in order to improve communication, collaboration, and interaction in teams and organizations.
Simply put, an impact map is a tree graph with four levels, where each level of the tree represents an answer to some fundamental questions about our system:
- Why are we building the system?
- Who benefits from it?
- How can the stakeholders achieve their goals? ...
