Refining requirements with AI

After you write a requirement and click Continue to Refine, OdoMate opens a chat with its business analyst before it builds anything. The analyst asks about the gaps in your description — missing fields, edge cases, which views you need — and turns the conversation into a structured specification you review and accept.

Starting the conversation

The chat starts itself: your requirement becomes the first message, and the analyst always responds with questions first. It never produces a specification on the first turn, even if your description already looks complete — there are always details worth pinning down before anything is generated.

Questions usually arrive as a clarifying question card you click through, but you can always type a free-text reply in the message box instead — both are read the same way.

Note

The badge next to the heading shows your expertise level (Business, Functional, or Technical). It controls how the analyst asks — plain language and no field types at Business, full ORM and OWL vocabulary at Technical — not what it asks about.

Answering questions

1. Answer through the question card, or type your own reply below it — typing instead marks the card “answered in chat” without losing it.

2. If the analyst’s message contains enough numbered questions to template (two or more), a Fill answer template link appears above the message box. Click it to drop a numbered list with each question’s label in brackets — 1. [Which approval flow?] — ready for you to fill in and send as one reply.

3. Send your reply. The analyst asks one or two follow-up questions per turn after the first, or tells you it has enough and produces the spec.

If you go quiet

A banner offers Keep active after 8 minutes of inactivity. After 10 minutes, a confirmation appears with Keep Session Active and Close Session — closing returns you to the chat with the session ended; nothing you already sent is lost, but you can’t continue that conversation.

Getting to a specification

You don’t have to ask explicitly — after a couple of rounds of questions and answers, the analyst may decide it has enough and hand back a structured spec on its own. Either way, once a spec exists three actions appear below the chat:

• Configure & Generate — accept the spec and move straight to configuring the generation run.
• Edit Spec — open the spec in an editable view (Edit/Preview toggle) to fix anything by hand before accepting it.
• Discard — abandon the refined spec and go back to the requirement text box.

You can also ask for the spec directly: the Finalize button below the message box becomes available once the analyst has replied at least once, and tells it to produce the spec right away instead of asking more questions.

Accepting a spec — from either path — saves it to your requirements library before moving on, so it’s there to reopen or version later even if you don’t finish generating from it.

Tip

Not every requirement needs this back-and-forth. Skip refinement, below the message box, goes straight to the configure step with your original description unchanged — no spec, no questions asked.