The main discussion of this post is business requirements.  What characteristics are required for a business requirement?  According to Thomas Hathaway and Karl Wiegers, requirements have a lot of requirements.  

Thomas Hathaway explained that business requirements should start with the words 'I need' (or anything along the lines of that), names a single component/feature/state/behavior is worth funding, focus on business outcome, and can be tracked back to the individual who has authority.  Thomas also explains that anybody should be able to understand the system requirements.  Once the requirements are established, the business departments and the technology department must determined if both side interpret the requirements correctly.  Once this has been established, programmers and analyst can proceed to start the project.

Karl Wieger also explains some characteristics of good requirements.  He explained that requirement statements should be correct, feasible, necessary, prioritized, unambiguous, and verifiable.  He then explains the characteristics of requirement specifications.  The requirements should be complete, modifiable, and traceable.  Unlike Thomas Hathaway, Karl Wieger breaks everything down in two categories.  The first set of characteristics explains what each requirement statement should consist.  As for the second set of characteristics, it explains what the entire document should consist.

Surprisingly, business requirements is new to me.  Only recently, my job started to implement procedures in order to get individuals to start creating goals, documents and business requirements.

On another note, I decided to join an IRC chat.  To start off, it was difficult joining it.  Before class, I never heard of it. I decided to join the #Ubuntu chat room.  I wanted to join the #android-dev, but I didn't know how to make myself 'visible'.  Everytime I tried to join the chat room, I ended up getting an error message explaining something along the lines that I can't be anonymous in order to join the IRC.  Back in the 90s, I'm sure this was an excellent way to communicate. Now? I think it is the most awful way to communicate. To start off, I was caught off guard with the first screen.  I learned that you could join any chat room by typing in whatever topic you want to talk about but I didn't take that seriously.  I stayed in the chat room for 30 minutes and felt pretty amazing that I was able to finally get in.  Majority of the chat is how someone joined or quit the chatroom.  Because they aren't a different color or distinguishable, it was kind of hard to read the discussion.  Apparently, someone was experiencing a problem and was asking for help.  From what I was able to read, it was an issue with the battery. I think it was an issue with a battery.  The notebook goes on 'standby' when the user doesn't want it to.  

Overall, I wouldn't want to IRC for anything. Instant messenger is definitely more use friendly and less confusing to the average user.  It was definitely a fun experience.  It might be good for computer professional, I can admit that.  With IRC you can get responses at a much quicker rather than an email or post a forum about your IT problems. On the other hand, I don't see everyday users using this kind of software.