Artifact: Glossary
This artifact defines important terms used by the project. It defines the meaning of all relevant terms to the system being built. These terms are the foundation for all requirements specifications.
Domain:  Requirements
Work Product Kinds:  Specification
Purpose
The goal of the Glossary is to provide a common vocabulary on which all stakeholders can agree. It can help to reach mutual understanding of the system among people from different functional groups.  The goal is not to record all possible terms but those that are unclear, ambiguous or which require some kind of elaboration.
Relationships
Description
Main Description

The Glossary helps to avoid a great deal of miscommunication by providing the development team with:

  • A central location to look for terms and abbreviations that are new to them
  • Definitions of terms that are used in a specific way within the domain

Definitions for the Glossary terms come from several sources such as requirements documents, specifications, and discussions with stakeholders and domain experts.

Illustrations
Templates
Key Considerations

In some projects where business or domain modeling is not performed, the Glossary is the primary artifact used to capture information about the project's business domain.

Tailoring
Impact of not havingMisunderstandings about the meanings of data items account for many instances of failed projects. Some of them become obvious only in the late stages of system testing and can be extremely expensive to correct.
Reasons for not needing

When the organization already has an existing glossary in place, the appropriate terms may be reused from it and each project will contribute some new ones.

Representation Options

The Glossary is a simple list of domain terms and their definitions.

This list could be published on a Wiki site to simplify access to, and maintenance of the information.