Writing Bulletproof Requirements: A Developer's Guide

Bad requirements are expensive. The IBM Systems Sciences Institute found that fixing a requirements error costs 100x more in production than in the requirements phase.

A bulletproof requirement has four properties: it is specific (no ambiguity), measurable (clear acceptance criteria), achievable (technically feasible), and bounded (explicit limits).

Avoid weasel words: 'fast', 'user-friendly', 'intuitive', 'seamless', 'robust'. These mean different things to different people. Replace 'fast' with 'responds within 200ms at 95th percentile under 1000 concurrent users.'

Use the Given-When-Then format for acceptance criteria. This forces you to think about preconditions, actions, and expected outcomes.

Automated requirement linting catches common anti-patterns: missing acceptance criteria, overlapping scope, undefined error handling, and unbounded feature descriptions.