The Intent layer deals with how to channel the intent of stakeholders to the rest of the development team, to ensure that validated builds with incremental capabilities reflect stakeholder intents. This is done by capturing and communicating the vision to all team members, and by translating the vision into test cases and requirements of different types. This allows the team to understand what capabilities need to be delivered to address stakeholder intent.

You find the most tasks for the Intent layer in the Requirements discipline, and the task to create test cases in the Test discipline. The corresponding work products are found under Requirements and Test domains.

The Intent layer is built upon the foundational Communication and collaboration layer. That layer constitutes the backbone of OpenUP in order to reflect the following:

• All roles in OpenUP are involved in intent development to ensure that, as a minimum, all team members properly understand stakeholders’ intent.
• Make sure that the best practices for collaborative development provided in the collaboration layer guides any work related to intent.

The intent layer is written in such a way that your organization can modify it to fit your style of development and stakeholder collaboration, without necessarily impacting how you deal with the other layers (Management layer and Solution layer).