Manuela Kohlhas is an experienced marketing expert with over a decade of experience, focusing on B2B technology companies. She has held senior positions in various organizations, where she has driven strategic marketing initiatives. She holds a degree in business administration and studied for a Master's in Innovation Management & Entrepreneurship at the Nuremberg Institute of Technology and Linköping University in Sweden.
As products become more complex, software-defined, and multidisciplinary, organizations need a structured approach to connect stakeholder needs with engineering execution. Requirements engineering provides the foundation for defining, validating, and managing requirements throughout the product and software development lifecycle, helping teams improve collaboration, maintain traceability, reduce risk, and deliver higher-quality products.
What is requirements engineering?
Requirements engineering is the structured process of discovering, analyzing, documenting, validating, and managing requirements throughout the product and software development lifecycle.
A requirement defines a capability, behavior, constraint, or condition that a system must satisfy. Requirements can originate from customers, business stakeholders, regulatory bodies, engineering teams, or end users.
The primary goal is to establish a clear, shared, and testable understanding of what must be delivered, while providing a controlled way to refine requirements as new information becomes available.
The two most common types of requirements that are often used in requirements engineering are:
- Functional requirements describe what a system must do.
- Non-functional requirements describe how the system should perform, including reliability, performance, security, usability, and scalability.
Requirements engineering bridges stakeholder needs and implementation, creating a clear path from initial concepts through design, development, testing, validation, and release across the product and software development lifecycle.
The importance of requirements engineering in product and software development
Many software development challenges trace back to unclear, incomplete, inconsistent, or poorly managed requirements. When teams move into development without a shared understanding of expected outcomes, gaps often surface later in the product and software development lifecycle when changes are more costly and disruptive.
Consider an engineering team developing a modern automotive lighting platform. Hundreds of requirements may define system behavior, safety expectations, performance constraints, regulatory obligations, and supplier deliverables. As designs evolve and product variants are introduced, teams need a reliable way to ensure requirements remain connected to verification activities and engineering decisions.
This challenge is common in complex product development environments. For example, ams OSRAM sought to standardize requirements practices across engineering teams developing sophisticated lighting systems after bringing together previously separate toolchains and processes. The initiative highlights how requirements engineering helps organizations establish consistency across projects, product variants, and verification activities as complexity grows.
Requirements engineering provides the structure needed to define stakeholder expectations, validate assumptions early, and maintain alignment throughout development. As products become increasingly software-driven and multidisciplinary, it helps organizations manage complexity while reducing the risk of costly downstream issues. In complex product development, requirements engineering cannot operate as an isolated authoring activity. It must connect requirements with risks, designs, tests, changes, variants, and releases across the product and software development lifecycle.
How ams OSRAM streamlined requirements engineering
Learn how ams OSRAM worked toward a common approach to requirements, variants, and test management.
Read the ams OSRAM Story
Requirements management vs requirements engineering
Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they represent different but closely related aspects of the same discipline. Requirements engineering focuses on defining and developing requirements through activities such as elicitation, analysis, specification, validation, and verification. Requirements management extends this work throughout the product and software development lifecycle by ensuring requirements remain accurate, connected, and actionable as products evolve.
Requirements management includes activities such as change control, traceability, version management, stakeholder collaboration, and impact analysis. Rather than a separate process, it is an ongoing part of requirements engineering that helps maintain alignment between stakeholder needs, engineering activities, testing efforts, and delivered outcomes. Organizations that excel in both defining requirements and managing them over time are better equipped to handle complexity, adapt to change, and deliver products that meet business and customer expectations.
Enable better outcomes with requirements management
Explore how effective requirements management supports complex product development initiatives.
Explore Requirements ManagementWhat are the key activities in the requirements engineering process?
Elicit stakeholder needs
Requirements elicitation focuses on identifying stakeholder needs, business objectives, technical constraints, and user expectations before development begins. Teams gather input through stakeholder interviews, workshops, user research, process analysis, and collaborative reviews. The goal is to uncover both explicit requirements and less obvious needs that could affect development outcomes later in the product and software development lifecycle.
Analyze and prioritize requirements
Requirements analysis helps teams identify conflicts, dependencies, assumptions, feasibility concerns, and gaps. Teams refine and prioritize requirements based on stakeholder value, technical constraints, risk, regulatory obligations, and intended use. This creates a stronger foundation for design, implementation, and verification.
Specify requirements
Once you identify requirements, document them in a clear, consistent, structured format. Well-defined requirements should be unambiguous, testable, traceable, and complete enough to guide downstream activities. Effective specification creates a shared source of truth for stakeholders, helping reduce misunderstandings during design, development, and testing.
Verify and validate requirements
Verification and validation ensure requirements are both high quality and aligned with stakeholder expectations. Requirements verification evaluates whether each requirement is well formed, clear, consistent, feasible, and testable. Requirements validation confirms that the documented requirements accurately represent stakeholder needs, intended use, and applicable constraints. Later in development, linked verification and validation activities provide evidence that the implemented product satisfies those requirements and supports its intended use.
Regular reviews help identify gaps early, reducing the risk of costly changes later in development.
Manage requirements and change
Requirements evolve throughout the product and software development lifecycle as priorities shift, regulations change, and new information becomes available. Requirements management provides the processes needed to control and evaluate those changes while maintaining version control, traceability, stakeholder alignment, and impact analysis. This visibility helps teams understand how updates affect designs, tests, releases, and compliance activities, supporting end-to-end traceability across development.
Common challenges to avoid when developing a requirements engineering process
Scope creep
Scope creep occurs when teams introduce new requirements without proper evaluation or approval. Uncontrolled expansion can increase development costs, extend timelines, and create confusion across teams. Formal reviews and approval processes help ensure changes are evaluated based on business value and project impact.
Do not "over-engineer"
Not every project requires excessive levels of documentation or process complexity. Organizations should implement processes proportional to project risk, regulatory requirements, and product complexity. Overly rigid approaches can slow innovation and reduce development agility.
Lack of feedback and reviews
Requirements developed in isolation often contain assumptions, omissions, or ambiguities. Regular stakeholder reviews encourage collaboration and help identify issues earlier in the product and software development lifecycle when changes are less disruptive. Continuous feedback also improves alignment between business and engineering teams.
Excluding stakeholders
One of the most common causes of requirement issues is not involving the right stakeholders. Different groups often bring unique perspectives regarding functionality, quality, usability, compliance, manufacturing, serviceability, or customer experience. Broad participation helps create more comprehensive and accurate requirements.
What are the benefits of requirements engineering?
Reduced rework and development risk
Requirements issues discovered late in development can be more difficult to resolve. Clarifying and validating requirements early helps teams identify gaps sooner, reducing avoidable rework, uncontrolled change, and downstream disruption.
Clearer scope and priorities
Documented requirements clarify project boundaries, priorities, and stakeholder expectations. A shared scope helps teams remain focused and evaluate proposed changes systematically while maintaining alignment with business objectives.
Improved efficiency
Clear, accessible requirements help reduce misunderstandings and conflicting assumptions. This shared understanding can streamline development, testing, and reviews while supporting more informed decisions across teams.
Supports compliance and quality processes
Traceable requirements provide documented evidence connecting requirements with implementation, testing, and validation activities. This visibility supports audits, compliance efforts, and quality processes while helping teams identify and manage potential risks.
Greater delivery predictability
Strong requirements practices help teams align development with customer, stakeholder, and market needs. Clear priorities, traceability, and structured change management can strengthen delivery predictability and support teams as business needs evolve.
Better communication
Requirements create a common reference point for stakeholders, systems engineers, developers, quality teams, and leadership. A shared understanding of goals and expectations helps teams collaborate, identify issues earlier, and make more informed decisions.
How does requirements engineering support regulated and complex industries?
Organizations in industries such as automotive, aerospace and defense, medical devices, industrial equipment, and high-tech manufacturing face development challenges that extend far beyond documenting requirements. Engineering teams must coordinate multiple disciplines, manage product variants, evaluate changes, and demonstrate that products meet intended requirements.
In these environments, requirements often span numerous systems, teams, suppliers, and development streams. A change to a single requirement can affect designs, tests, documentation, and release plans. Requirements engineering provides the framework needed to evaluate those impacts and maintain consistency as products evolve.
This becomes particularly important for organizations developing complex, software-defined systems. As demonstrated by ams OSRAM's efforts to unify requirements practices across its engineering organization, maintaining a common approach to requirements and verification can help teams manage increasing product complexity while supporting long-term product quality objectives.
How can PTC help companies with requirements engineering?
As products become increasingly software-defined, connected, and subject to evolving regulatory requirements, managing requirements across the product and software development lifecycle becomes more challenging. Engineering teams need a way to stay aligned across stakeholder needs, development activities, testing efforts, and compliance objectives while adapting to change.
Codebeamer helps organizations establish a connected approach to requirements management by bringing requirements, risks, tests, and development activities together within an integrated environment. the ALM lifecycle, Codebeamer connects requirements with risks, tests, changes, and development work, helping teams establish traceability, evaluate change impact, and maintain alignment through validation and release. Through integrations with the wider engineering toolchain, organizations can extend traceability across ALM, PLM, and systems engineering domains.
By reducing reliance on disconnected documents, spreadsheets, and manual processes, organizations can improve collaboration, support compliance initiatives, and maintain alignment from initial requirements through validation and release
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