Understanding the requirements format

I don’t care how you format the feature specification document. Feel free to have an overview and an introduction, state the scope and the stakeholders, or add versioning tracking every change. If you find those useful for the time they take to prepare, add that information. If not, don’t.

Many tools let you track requirements more flexibly than having a single document. They have features such as reusing requirements between projects and mapping requirements onto the test cases that cover them. While I’ll refer to the specification as a document here, I recommend that you use these tools since they give you greater control to move requirements around and tie them into your development team’s processes.

If you’re stuck with wiki pages or shared documents until you persuade everyone to change, a few formatting rules will make everyone’s lives easier. The other improvements listed here apply to the...