Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
A written deliverable that gathers, for a given product opportunity, what the team knows about its environment — business, product, customer, user, technical, business rules, standards, culture on the ground, competition, decisions already taken — and that qualifies each element according to whether it is known, believed, doubtful or unsaid.
Full definition
The term has no established definition: in most teams, "the context" is an introductory paragraph placed at the head of a specification, written to situate the reader before getting into the solution.
In the articles on this blog, the context document is a self-standing artifact, prior to the specification and independent of it. It carries a status (draft, in review, validated), an owner and a date of last update; its sections are attached to the product risks they work through rather than to the disciplines that write them.
A difference of scale separates it from the Context: the context is the durable workspace attached to a goal, the context document is a dated piece of writing that renders its state for a precise opportunity.
Usage in the field
Used to designate the deliverable whose value rises once the capacity to produce software stops being scarce, and to set against the specification and the roadmap an artifact that frames the problem instead of describing the solution.
Synonyms and variants
"The 00-context", after the name of the file that holds it at the head of an opportunity folder; "an opportunity's context".
Not to be confused with
- specification — a description of the product's expected behaviour, written to be built. It assumes the framing is done; the context document produces it.
- framing note — a short synthesis fixing a scope and an objective in order to launch a piece of work. It settles matters; the context document sets out what is being settled, doubts included.
- roadmap — a dated sequencing of what will be built. It orders decisions already taken; the context document works through those that aren't.
- Context — a durable workspace gathering, around a goal, sources, notes, decisions and drafts. The document is a written, dated rendering of it, not the space itself.
Examples
The 00-context.md template annotated by the risks it works through — business viability, value on the buyer's side, value and usability, feasibility.
The four registers of qualification it imposes: what I know, what I believe, what makes me doubt, what goes unsaid.
Ambiguities / debates
Ordinary usage — a context chapter in a specification — and the usage retained here don't designate the same object, though they carry the same name. The difference lies in autonomy: a chapter exists to introduce a solution already envisaged, the document exists before any solution is retained.