Reasons to Require

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Requirements Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Agilists value working software over comprehensive documentation. But writing requirements remains an indispensable process that should occur throughout the life of your projects. Here are six great reasons, spanning discovery to delivery, for why we value requirements and user stories.

Once upon a time, development teams would not begin work without a complete requirements document, often totaling hundreds of pages. With the embrace of Agile methods, many of these teams now start with only a short document with high-priority use cases. But the process of writing requirements does not end simply because the work has begun. In fact, it should continue for the life of the project.

Requirements Definition should not be viewed as a task that can be completed and checked off as we move on to the next item on the list. While hefty documents are no longer needed in Agile settings, the act of writing requirements almost never stops. You don’t “complete” the document; you have enough fully specified requirements for the team to prepare and work on development. This means staying a few sprints ahead of the team with useful documentation — not just discussions in front of a whiteboard or in a hallway.

But beyond providing enough information for your development team, the act of writing requirements has several other important benefits. If you take …

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