The Essential Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability

This chapter introduces helpful ways to approach writing requirements.

Requirements are the foundation of a smooth-running process and are the essential inputs to your mission-critical projects. Effectively managing the flow of changes and refinements early in your lifecycle will significantly reduce both quality issues downstream and the volatility that plagues so many projects. 

Writing requirements and requirements management can appear to be a complex topic, but at its core, it’s a simple concept. It helps teams answer the question: Does everyone—from business leaders to product managers and project leaders to developers, QA managers and testers—understand what is being built and why?  

When everyone is collaborating and has full context and visibility into the discussions, decisions, and changes involved in product development, they maintain high quality and almost always ensure success 

In this chapter, we look at:  

• Functional vs. Non-Functional requirements – and examples of both  
• How to write effective product and software requirements  
• Characteristics of excellent requirements  
• Do’s and Don’ts for writing requirements