Requirements Capture

Requirements capture is an essential part of the Product Management discipline, since it seeks to concretely identify customer and market needs and desires, so that these real world problems can be addressed and realised.

User Story Creation

A key tool for documenting requirements which have been captured is by writing user stories. User stories attempt to describe the problem from the user's point of view, including the action they wish to take, and the reasons why. They include three elements:

• The user name or role
• The action the user wishes to take
• The desired outcome

It may feel weird to write these sorts of stories, but they have useful results, because they have defined the real issue, rather than jumping straight to the solution...

Defining the Requirements

So the next step is to define the high-level (not technically detailed) requirements. These could include:

• There needs to be a designated and clearly-marked cycle path
• Cycle traffic needs to be separate from pedestrian traffic either by painted lines, or ideally physical dividers
• Cycle traffic should be kept separate from road traffic

Obviously we have chosen a very high-level example, with high-level requirements, but hopefully it is easy to see that defining the end goal and why it is needed is essential to defining and eventually fulfilling requirements.

But what if I don't...?

Projects without clear requirements are doomed to failure from the start. In the Age of Agile, there is value in continuing to collect requirements and insights as the project develops. However, having a clear idea of what the customer needs at the beginning of the project will help keep the work on track. But requirements capture can be an ongoing process with customers throughout the development process.

This image shows what too often happens when requirements are not clearly defined!

There are many good books on the topic available:

This page was built by J Woolverton