Requirement

In software engineering, a requirement is a description of what a system should do. Systems may have from dozens to thousands of requirements.

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A collection of requirements then define the characteristics or features of the desired (required) system, but do not say how the system should implement those requirements. Language in the requirements that describes how the system should be implemented is known as implementation bias.

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In a classical software engineering approach, requirements are used as input into the design stages (functional design followed by technical design) of the development process.

Related Topics:
Functional design - Technical design

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The requirements phase may have been preceded by a feasibility study, or a conceptual phase of the project. The requirements phase may be broken down into requirements elicitation (gathering the requirements from stakeholders), analysis (checking for consistency and completeness), definition (writing down descriptive requirements for developers), and specification (creating an initial bridge between requirements and design).

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