A Brief Introduction to Requirements
Despite the wide adoption of modern agile practices, formal engineering requirements remain important in many organizations. Formal requirements are often defined early in a project (i.e. before design and implementation), though they often evolve throughout the product lifecycle. They are important because project and industries that define formal requirements specifications tend to hold engineering teams accountable to meeting those requirements. Formal requirements can derive from industry regulation and compliance standards such as FAA regulations, FCC requirements, NIST cybersecurity standards, HIPPA compliance, PCI standards, etc. or be defined by engineering teams in collaboration with customers to capture project-specific constraints.