A project pre requisite is to ensure that team mates understand each concepts. Glossary is a mandatory tool to avoid the Babel symptom. Personally I start a project by reading the concept’s definitions, it helps me to interconnect them. Words with confused definitions are future system’s weaknesses.

For Veracruz project, I initiated the shared glossary within Microsoft OneNote’s  subpages. While I was defining a business entity, I identified stories associated to it and I assigned them a priority category. It’s a tad longer but I didn’t try to be exhaustive.

Benefits:

• Every concepts are illustrated by story(ies).
• Once the glossary is over I used the tag summary feature to generate a list of stories ordered by priority. This will be a starting point to initiate the redaction of the project Product backlog.
• We use Live Mesh to share those documents in between project’s contributors.

You can download the OneNote glossary .zip or just the resulting list of stories as .pdf.