8 Tips for Writing Better Requirements

Requirements are the foundation of any software project. Without them, developers don’t have a blueprint to follow, leading to misaligned expectations and wasted resources. Knowing how to write requirements correctly ensures everyone involved has a shared understanding of what needs to be built, reducing the risk of miscommunication and scope creep. Clear, precise requirements lead to better planning, design, and execution, ultimately resulting in a product that meets users’ needs and expectations.

While well-written requirements provide developers with a clear roadmap, not all requirements are written in a way that streamlines the development process. When requirements are ambiguous, organizations face misaligned goals that involve costly rework, delays, and wasted resources. Set your team up for success by avoiding common mistakes and following best practices when writing requirements—ensuring your project stays on track from start to finish.

Why is writing good requirements important?

If you’re a software developer learning how to write requirements, it’s important to know that specificity is key. Imagine you receive a requirement that states, “The system should be user-friendly.” This is vague and open to interpretation—you might think this is asking for a simple interface, while your coworker understands it to mean the system should be highly configurable.

Unclear requirements lead to confusion and conflicting interpretations, which subsequently cause rework, increase costs, and delay timelines. Writing and managing requirements as effectively as possible is key to setting a product up for success. It’s crucial that engineers are able to document, analyze, and prioritize requirements as easily as possible. Further, as products grow more complex, traceability is paramount as it encourages transparency between all team members and stakeholders. When everyone involved can track changes in real time, organizations typically see an improvement in product quality, delivery times, and efficiency.

Requirements form the foundation of quality software—and as software becomes more complicated, its requirements need to be more transparent. Without good requirements, developers, designers, testers, and stakeholders might have a different understanding of what the final product should achieve. With a clear, concise roadmap, teams can limit scope creep and reduce the risk of costly errors or miscommunications. Moreover, well-written requirements serve as a reference point throughout the entire development lifecycle, helping teams stay focused on the original goals and allowing for more accurate progress tracking and decision-making. Understanding the key components of good requirements is a sure-fire way to start a new development process on the right track—and keep it that way throughout its completion.

Common mistakes when writing requirements

Creating a requirements backlog is the first step in a robust requirements management process. By writing down all the necessary requirements, it’s easier to communicate or translate user needs to developers. This collection of requirements will also support communication between all involved team members, developers, and stakeholders, making them a powerful tool for cutting costs and boosting transparency throughout the process. However, the impact of these requirements depends on how well they are crafted—clear, concise, and direct ones are essential to ensuring their success. Common mistakes when writing requirements include:

• Using incorrect or inconsistent terminology.

• Making grammatical mistakes.

• Being too vague or ambiguous.

• Being too specific and wordy.

• Making false assumptions.

• Describing how to implement something instead of what is required.

What should a requirement contain?

Requirement engineers need to be extremely detail-oriented and make sure they structure, phrase, and present requirements in the clearest way possible. Ideally, every requirement statement (written from the user's perspective) should:

• Contain a user role: This identifies who will interact with the feature or function. Clearly defining the user helps ensure the requirement is designed for the correct audience.

• Explain how the user benefits from the requirement: The value of the product must be clear. This keeps the focus on delivering functionality that aligns with larger goals and user needs.

• Outline the desired state that the requirement will help achieve: Each requirement should include a benchmark for success by indicating what the final product should look like.

• If relevant, include metrics that allow requirement testing: When possible, include quantifiable metrics, such as response times or performance benchmarks, to allow for clear testing and validation. This makes it easier to verify that the system meets expectations.

A general rule of thumb is that a requirement should follow a simple structure, such as:

The ‘thing’ shall 'provide specific action’ to achieve ‘desired result’.

These building blocks serve as a checklist for engineers as they learn how to write requirements at the start of a development cycle, but they aren’t the end-all and be-all of considerations during this process. It’s important to zoom in on requirements (ensuring they are easy to understand and technically correct), as well as to zoom out (confirming they are testable and in line with larger objectives). Taking a holistic view of what the requirements need to achieve makes it easier to write ones that are effective in the long run.

8 best practices for requirements management

It’s easy to write requirements on a whim, using just the information available at hand. But a few extra minutes of time can make a world of difference. Constructive requirements should always be:

Necessary

Ask yourself the “Three W’s:”

• What will we do?

• Why are we doing it?

• Who benefits from this?

If you can’t easily come up with answers to the above questions, chances are you don’t have a full understanding of your users' needs. As a result, you might be including requirements that aren’t actually needed—leading to longer development timelines, increased costs, and a loss of focus.

Clear

Once you have confirmed that a requirement is, in fact, necessary, it’s time to start writing. When documenting the requirement, it is incredibly important to be as clear, direct, and unambiguous as possible. Simple sentences ensure that everyone reading them understands their meaning in the same way. To ensure peak clarity, it’s best to avoid:

• Using the passive voice.

• Buzzwords, jargon, abbreviations, acronyms, or any terms that aren’t widely understood (if they can’t be avoided for some reason, don’t forget to include them in a glossary).

• Adverbs which can be interpreted in different ways (ambiguity).

• Negative phrases outlining what shouldn’t be done (instead, describe what should be done).

• Vague expressions which are hard to test and verify.

Concise & consistent

Keeping requirements concise is paramount—many even say that if it can’t fit on a post-it note, it’s already too long. Prioritize readability by keeping the message short and to the point. This makes it much easier for stakeholders and developers to organize, absorb, and analyze the requirements of a project. However, while succinct requirements are preferable, crucial information should never be left out for the sake of length. Requirements should be as concise as possible while still fully conveying all the relevant information.

Using inconsistent terminology when capturing requirements can cause confusion, mistakes, and delays. Creating a project glossary at the beginning of the process will help keep everyone on the same page. Make sure that all the terms are listed, do not contradict themselves, and that user and developer language is aligned. Referring to this glossary while writing the requirements will ensure the terms you use stay consistent and understandable for everyone involved.

Accurate

Even if you believe a requirement is needed, it never hurts to double-check. Make sure all the information included in the requirement is correct and that your stated assumptions are valid. Verifying the accuracy and necessity of each requirement can prevent potential missteps and costly revisions later in the development process.

Feasible

After confirming that the assumptions in the requirement are correct, you need to make sure that your statement is technically feasible. Start by taking a look at the project budget and timeline, then at the resources available to your team. If the requirement can be practically implemented with the conditions at hand, then it's ready to be incorporated in the project plan.

Prioritized

Requirements should be categorized by type and then prioritized accordingly. The exact categories differ by organization, but the main types of requirements include:

• Functional requirements

• Non-functional requirements

• Business requirements

• System requirements

Categorizing requirements makes it easier for stakeholders to read them, manage them, and figure out which are most relevant to their roles. Then, prioritizing them in order of importance helps accurately define the project's scope and create a schedule for implementing each one.

Verifiable

When structuring requirements, it’s essential to ensure they are verifiable, meaning it must be possible to test the system and demonstrate that it fulfills the requirement. Clear, unambiguous language is key to making verification feasible. Vague terms such as “maximize” or “minimize,” “easy,” “flexible,” or “safe” are difficult to measure and can lead to confusion during testing. Requirements should be specific and objective to allow for concrete evaluation of system performance—and to allow for the final critical aspect of requirements: traceability.

Traceable

Traceability ensures there are clear links between requirements and other project elements. This allows project managers, developers, and stakeholders to document and track the whole lifecycle of each requirement both forward (to development, testing, and deployment) and backward (to business and stakeholder goals). When traceability is adequately managed, you can minimize “stray” code (that is, code not related to a requirement) and be able to track which requirements are covered by test cases. To make requirements traceable, each one should be labeled with a unique identifier and have its source information clearly documented. All of this needs to be carefully tracked in a shared central repository accessible to all team members involved.

Traceability is paramount for change management and compliance, helping teams understand the scope, complexity, and impact of changes. By maintaining a clear line of sight between requirements and other project components, teams can assess how changes to a single requirement can ripple across the development cycle, affecting timelines and other resources. This visibility is especially important for regulatory compliance, when auditors might have to verify that specific requirements have been met and tested according to industry standards. Further, strong traceability helps identify any inconsistencies, gaps, or errors in the implementation of requirements—ensuring nothing crucial is missed during development.

Requirements can make or break a development cycle, and the way they’re written can play a big role in their impact. When you have all the information you need to write clear, concise, and direct requirements, it’s easy to set your team up for success. ALM solutions like Codebeamer can help fill in the blanks with:

• Centralized documentation

• End-to-end traceability

• Seamless integration

• Enhanced collaboration and communication

Without these capabilities, teams can face a plethora of hurdles, straining communication and complicating project execution. By providing real-time access to project data, ALM solutions equip teams with the insights needed to write more accurate and well-informed requirements. With visibility into dependencies, resource constraints, and stakeholder feedback, Codebeamer ensures that requirements are not only well-documented, but also grounded in the practical realities of the project.