But aren't business rules the same as requirements? No, not really. As Kulak and Gurney4 say, "Use cases ... cannot portray all the subtleties of how a business is run. For this, we need business rules ... A list of business rules is not the same thing as a list of requirements ... Business rules are the written and unwritten rules that dictate how a company or agency conducts its business. Requirements relate to a specific application being considered or developed."

The method begins with the intentions of the people inside an organization who know what a program should do. Mr. Simonyi calls these people “domain experts,” and he expects them to work with programmers to list all the concepts the software must possess.

The concepts are then translated into a higher-level representation of the software’s functions called the domain code, using a tool called the domain workbench.

“The biggest problem we have in software is communications between the business people and the developers.”
“We are used to seeing and hearing about big IT failures, but often the communication gap is in small things, delivering things that aren’t very useful.”