What is a requirement?
A requirement describes a condition or capability needed to satisfy a business need.
The source material groups product requirements into four useful categories:
1. Business requirements
The higher-level organizational need, problem, opportunity, or goal.
Example:
Increase repeat purchases from existing customers.
2. Stakeholder requirements
What a particular stakeholder or stakeholder group needs.
Example:
Customer service representatives need visibility into subscription status.
3. Solution requirements
The capabilities, functions, or characteristics the solution must provide.
Example:
The system should allow customers to pause a subscription.
4. Transition requirements
Temporary capabilities needed to move from the current state to the future state.
Examples:
- Data migration
- Training
- Operational changes
- Cutover activities
Elicitation
Elicitation is the structured process of discovering information from stakeholders and other sources.
Useful techniques covered by the source material include:
- Interviews
- Surveys
- Workshops
- Observation
- Brainstorming
- Collaborative sessions
The technique should match the situation.
A practical elicitation flow
1. Prepare
- Identify participants
- Define the objective
- Prepare questions
- Collect existing information
2. Conduct
- Ask open questions
- Clarify assumptions
- Explore edge cases
- Separate facts from opinions
3. Confirm
- Summarize what was understood
- Ask stakeholders to validate it
- Resolve ambiguity
- Record decisions
Good elicitation questions
Instead of:
“Do you need a dashboard?”
Ask:
“What decisions are currently difficult to make because the information is unavailable or delayed?”
Instead of:
“Should we add a filter?”
Ask:
“How do users currently find the records they need?”
Requirement quality
A useful requirement should be understandable, sufficiently detailed for its audience, aligned with the business need, and capable of being verified.
Before accepting a requirement, ask:
- Is the business reason clear?
- Is the requirement understandable?
- Is it testable?
- Is the expected outcome clear?
- Are dependencies known?
- Has the relevant stakeholder agreed?
Portfolio application
Create a sample requirement set for a fictional eCommerce subscription system and show:
Business Requirement → Stakeholder Requirement → Solution Requirement → Acceptance Criteria → Test/Validation.