In modern teams, requirements engineering is not a single discipline, but teamwork – and testers play a central role in this. Thinking about requirements early on strengthens the whole-team approach, supports shift left, and ensures that “testability” does not only become an issue shortly before go-live. The following five reasons show how requirements engineering measurably facilitates testing and sustainably improves product quality.
Deeper Understanding of Requirements
Did you know that there are many different ways to represent requirements? In agile environments, they are often captured in the form of user stories. According to the definition of the internationally active IREB Board and the curriculum for the Certified Requirements Engineering - Foundation Level (IREB CPRE) basic certificate, these include, these belong to template-based work products, as they typically follow a fixed syntax (“As a [role], I want [goal/action], so that [benefit]”).
In addition, requirements can also be written in plain natural language, where they are formulated freely. This often leads to a greater margin for interpretation.
If you want to be very formal, you can also use models. Due to their formality, models often provide more clarity—provided you are familiar with them.
In the course, you will not only learn how to use models, but also how they can help you better understand requirements. For example, by transforming a requirement into a different representation to check whether it is truly unambiguous and understandable.
Better Test Cases Through Better Requirements
This very transformation of requirements into different forms of documentation can also lead to better test cases. As known from the ISTQB CTFL (ISTQB course for the internationally recognized certificate ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level), testers often rely on systematic test design techniques.
Template-based work products (such as phrase templates) or models not only provide clarity but can also directly support test case derivation.
In addition, testers learn in the IREB CPRE about quality criteria that requirements should meet to a high degree. When testers are actively involved in the review process, this not only leads to better requirements—but also creates the opportunity to derive clear and risk-oriented test cases from them.
Supporting the Whole-Team Approach
In most projects, there is no single “requirements engineer.” Anyone who takes on tasks related to requirements engineering also assumes responsibility within this process at that moment.
The whole-team approach aims to create synergies through diverse knowledge, a shared interest in quality, and personal responsibility. These synergies can be fostered, for example, when a tester is already involved in creating or refining requirements.
In line with the shift-left principle, requirements are statically reviewed as early as possible. Through a kind of “sample development”—for example, by transforming requirements into test cases—a shared understanding within the team can be built early on.
Of course, within the whole-team approach, testers do not necessarily have to perform these static reviews. However, it is often beneficial to involve different roles in validation. (Please note: Validation in the context of requirements engineering means examining work products and requirements with regard to their quality.)
Change Management and Traceability
Who doesn’t know this situation: everything is actually ready for release – and then, for some reason, a requirement has to be changed again. This is not only frustrating but can also cause significant additional effort.
The extent of this effort becomes visible through an impact analysis. To perform such an analysis, we need so-called traces.
What happens if I change requirement N? What is affected? Where is this requirement implemented? Which test cases need to be adapted? And how high is the risk of this change?
These and many other questions should be answered as part of change management. For us as testers, the additional testing effort and the potentially changed risk are of particular interest.
In the IREB CPRE, you learn how to make requirements meaningfully traceable (and also when too much traceability can be counterproductive), enabling you to support change management in projects and respond optimally to changes.
Increasing Overall Product Quality
Different roles contribute different perspectives to project work based on their experience. A tester will often identify different risks than, for example, a developer.
Testers can make an important contribution by supporting the context* definition at the very beginning of a requirements engineering process, ensuring that it is captured as concretely as possible and that risks are minimized early on.
In this way, testing know-how can make a significant contribution to product quality – long before the first increment can even be “held in your hands.”
(*In requirements engineering, context refers to the entirety of factors that influence the system to be developed. It therefore has a significant impact on the requirements. For this reason, it is important to keep the context as stable as possible from the very beginning in order to minimize the risk of errors.)
Conclusion
In an ideal world, quality is not “tested in” at the very end, but is created right from the beginning—through requirements, understanding, and shared expectations. For testers to actively shape this process, they need more than just testing methods: they need a solid understanding of how requirements are created, how they are evaluated, and how they can be improved.
This enables them to effectively challenge requirements, make them testable, and actively contribute to quality – and that is exactly what the IREB CPRE training provides.
Check it out for yourself.