Work out what the application needs to do.

Discover what the request leaves unsaid

Requirements discovery starts with the problem people are trying to solve. Their explanations contain useful detail: the outcome they need, the rules they follow, the information they handle, and the situations that cause trouble. Some of that knowledge is written down. Some only becomes clear when someone asks about an exception.

In AlphaTales, the project foundation, clarification answers, and application workflows provide business context for the feature plan. Selected feature titles are expanded into editable specifications, using the available context to describe behaviour and boundaries. Your team reviews that draft against the original need and resolves what the context does not establish.

A draft can also expose a decision the business has not made. If nobody has established who reviews a manager’s own leave request, a more detailed specification cannot settle the policy for them. The team needs to resolve that question and carry the answer into the requirement.

Keep the business need behind each requirement

Business requirements explain what needs to improve and why it matters. They help the team decide which features are needed and question work that does not serve that need.

Consider a leave-request application. The business needs requests and decisions in one place, with decisions made by someone other than the requester. That establishes the purpose. It does not yet explain who can approve a request, what they can change, or what the employee sees afterward.

AlphaTales records a feature’s purpose in its intent section, alongside its functional requirements and scope. During review, use that purpose to decide whether the proposed behaviour is necessary. Payroll changes, for example, can remain outside the feature even though they belong to the wider HR process.

Describe the behaviour precisely enough to build

Functional requirements explain what the application must do. Name the actor and the action, then include the conditions or restrictions that affect it. “Managers can approve leave” leaves too much open. “Send a manager’s own request to the assigned HR reviewer and prevent self-approval” gives the team a specific rule to examine.

AlphaTales generates editable feature details from the selected titles and available context. The current feature screen separates Functional Requirements from Acceptance Scenarios, Permissions & Ownership, and Edge Cases & States. That separation lets reviewers check the behaviour against who may perform it and what happens outside the normal path.

Look for gaps before accepting the draft

Missing requirements often sit between otherwise reasonable statements. A request reaches HR, but which reviewer receives it? Approval is recorded, but is the employee notified? The usual reviewer is away, but nobody has defined a fallback.

Read the specification with the people who own those decisions. Add the missing rule to the relevant section instead of leaving it in a conversation that the next reader may never see. The example below follows one decision from the business need to a functional requirement and an acceptance scenario. Open the unresolved question to see why the requirement still needs review.

Turn the answers into structured requirements

Resolving that fallback question changes more than one sentence. The requirement must name what happens, and the acceptance scenario must check that same outcome. Keep the feature’s sections consistent as decisions become clear. Its intent explains the need. Functional requirements describe the behaviour. Acceptance scenarios describe an observable result. Scope states what is included and excluded.

For the self-approval rule, the acceptance scenario should cover both sides: the assigned HR reviewer can decide the request, while the requester cannot approve it. Permissions & Ownership records the access rule; Verification Required records the evidence needed to check it. The same decision should not say different things in different sections.

You can edit the generated sections as the team resolves questions. The feature details guide explains how to manage this information in AlphaTales.

Decide whether the requirements are complete enough

Filled-in sections are useful, but they do not establish requirements completeness. A specification can contain plenty of text and still omit an important permission, failure state, or business rule.

Before handing it forward, check that the intended outcome is covered, the requirements agree, and the acceptance scenarios test the stated behaviour. Review exceptions with the people who encounter them. Keep unresolved decisions explicit rather than allowing a plausible assumption to become an unnoticed commitment.

AlphaTales provides the structure and generated starting point. Your team determines whether the requirements describe the application it actually needs.