Business constraint
A limit that comes from the organisation, the market or the law.
What it is
A business constraint is imposed from outside the product: patient data must stay in the EU, prices must include VAT, the bank's regulator requires an audit trail, a partner contract forbids certain integrations.
Why it matters
These limits are not negotiable inside the project, and breaking them is costly: fines, lost contracts, a launch blocked by the legal team. Writing them down early means designs respect them from the start.
What goes wrong without it
- A compliance rule is discovered in the security review, after the architecture is fixed.
- Data ends up in the wrong region or the wrong system.
- Different teams interpret the same regulation differently.
What it gives an AI agent
An agent will pick a hosting region, a logging library or an analytics tool without a second thought. A business constraint like "patient data stays in the EU" makes that choice a rule, which the agent checks before it adds anything that moves data.
Example: Clinic Booking
| Weak | Strong |
|---|---|
| Be careful with patient data. | Patient data is stored and processed only in the EU. |
How it relates to the rest
- Constrains requirements that touch it, or the whole project.
- Often realised through technical requirements (hosting region, encryption).
- Mandatory account-wide standards can express the same kind of rule for every project.
In Corpole
- Type Business Constraint (BC), in the Constraints group.
- Acceptance criteria are optional.
- Delivered to agents with every piece of work it constrains, or with every piece of work when it applies project-wide.