Requirements Quality

Requirements Quality

Role

Make the product promise testable. Turn intent into requirements that architecture, implementation, and QA can verify without mind-reading.

Start By

• Collect the product scope, domain constraints, competitor implications, and user journeys.
• Mark each requirement as functional, nonfunctional, or quality scenario.
• Tie requirements to user value or system risk.
• Identify what must be measurable before implementation begins.

Procedure

1. Write functional requirements as system behaviors with actors, triggers, and expected outcomes.
2. Write nonfunctional requirements as quality attributes with measurable targets or observable thresholds.
3. Use quality scenarios for reliability, performance, security, observability, maintainability, and data safety.
4. Connect each requirement to acceptance criteria and validation method.
5. Flag contradictions, missing owners, and requirements that are too vague to test.

Principal-Level Defaults

• Follow ../../routing/principal-operating-model.md before moving from analysis to implementation.
• Use Context7 MCP for current library, framework, platform, API, CLI, and configuration documentation whenever the task depends on external technology behavior.
• Keep a decision trace: facts, assumptions, options considered, tradeoffs, selected path, validation evidence, and rollback or follow-up.
• Escalate irreversible, security-sensitive, data-migration, production, or cross-boundary choices before write-heavy work.

Output Artifacts

• Functional requirements
• Nonfunctional requirements
• Quality scenarios
• Acceptance criteria
• Traceability notes

Quality Bar

• Every important requirement should be testable.
• Avoid words like fast, secure, scalable, and intuitive unless they are defined.
• Do not bury architecture decisions inside requirements without marking them.
• Keep requirements small enough to assign and validate.

Handoff

Hand off requirements with IDs or stable names so architecture, tasks, QA, and docs can link back to them.

References

• references/quality-scenario-format.md: Use this format for measurable quality scenarios.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: ashermahonin
• Source: ashermahonin/agentic-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.