How to write requirements?

How do you write requirements with Requirement Yogi?

There are a couple of actions you can take to write and structure your requirements:

• The tables

• The key patterns

• The Requirement Types

• The writing style

Best Practice 1: Put your requirements in Tables

We recommend you to write your requirements in tables, this way you’ll be able to assign properties and dependencies to your requirements, and have a clear traceability and readability of your specifications. You can use horizontal tables, and also vertical tables.

Best practice 2: Defining your key patterns

We recommend to keep your requirement keys concise, but you are rather free in terms of format. You can use:

• most keyboard symbols

• Paragraph symbol

• blank spaces

• Language characters like arab, german, or japanese.

However, do not use % , / or \.

In terms of prefix, and what patterns you should use, we recommend to group your requirements per type. This prefix will allow you to look for all similar requirements, and will also allow us to autosuggest the next requirements you want to create.

• For example, business requirements, functional requirements and technical requirements: BR-PRODUCT-001, FN-PRODUCT-001 , TECH-PRODUCT-001.

For the numbering, we recommend to put an extra 0 depending on the number of requirements you plan to have. This will simply help us to keep the order in the search and traceability, making sure number 10 will be put correctly in order after the number 9.

Best Practice 3: Ways to add your first requirement

There are more than one way to create new requirements.

• I am writing my requirements one by one, as I create my specifications

  • Use the /req shortcut to add our macros. You’ll be able to write your requirement key and insert it.

• Inserting the requirement macro individually takes me too much time, I want to generate my requirements

  • Use the Transformation wizard in your table and select the rule ‘Generate keys’. Find out more in the documentation.

• I already have my requirement keys written in text, how can I transform the requirements?

  • Same as the point above, use the Transformation wizard and choose the rule ‘Transform text in keys’.

  • 💡 You can also do the same with requirement links, and transform mentions of existing requirement definitions. Read the docs.

Best Practice 4: Organize your requirements per type

Combining all the best practices above, the requirement types will help you bring more clarity and structure over your different key patterns. You will also be able to create requirements more efficiently with templates, and check the compliance of those requirements.

• Create your requirement type and choose the key pattern, replacing the numbering by %.

• Assign the properties and external properties desired, and make them required to trigger a validation.

• Save your requirement type.

• Create a page from this requirement type, and see your requirement type.

This template will generate the first requirements with the correct key, create your requirement table with the correct properties, and the rest is now up to you!