A Business Analyst’s Top 10 Tips for Writing Better Requirements
By Damon Ankers. December 20, 2018
Although writing the requirements for an IT project may seem like quite a trivial task, it can often be a crucial part of communicating the aims and expected outcomes of the project between two parties. In a recent article published in Analyst Anonymous, Business Analyst Katarzyna Kot of Devoteam gave her top tips for how to make your written requirements clearer and ultimately more successful.
- Keep sentences and paragraphs short.
- Write requirements in the active voice (a does b, not b is done by a).
- Avoid negative (or inverse) requirements.
- Write complete sentences with proper grammar, spelling and punctuation.
- Use terms consistently – define them in a glossary or data dictionary.
- Use a limited vocabulary – a simple subset of English, avoiding terms that may ?confuse non-technical or foreign readers.
- Avoid conjunctions (and, or) that make multiple requirements.
- Avoid let-out clauses or words that imply options or exceptions (unless, except, ?if necessary, but).
- Focus on stating what result the requirement will provide for a stakeholder.
- Use templates for requirement sentences, for example: The <system function>shall provide <system capability> to achieve <goal>.
These handy tips will work effectively to ensure that all parties, whether it is the client, the web designer or the IT technician, can understand clearly and quickly what the project is going to achieve and how it is going to achieve it.
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