Author a requirement

An end-to-end walkthrough — write a requirement with acceptance criteria, clean up its quality, check it against your frameworks, and move it into review.

This guide takes one requirement from blank to review-ready. It uses the universal item actions from Working with items for creating and editing, and focuses on what makes a requirement good: clarity, testability, and compliance. For the concepts behind each step, see Authoring, Quality scoring, and Compliance checks.

Write the requirement

Before you start Open the Requirements module in your project.

Create a requirement the usual way — + Add, or right-click in the tree and choose Add Item.
Write the requirement statement: one clear, testable obligation, stated as what the system shall do.
Add Acceptance Criteria — how you'll know it's met. These are what your tests will verify.
Complete the remaining fields the requirement type defines, and save.

Result A requirement record with a statement and acceptance criteria, versioned from the moment you save it.

Clean up its quality

As you write, the quality engine scores the requirement and flags wording that would weaken it — ambiguous or vague terms, untestable phrasing, missing criteria.

Check the Quality Score on the requirement.
Open the quality analysis to see Issues grouped by category, each with a Suggestion.
Revise the statement to resolve the issues — replace ambiguous words, make the obligation testable, tighten the criteria.
Re-check until the categories read No issues and the score reflects a clean requirement.

Result A requirement that's clear and testable, with its quality score recorded — not assessed after the fact, but as you write.

Tip The word lists and rules behind the score are configured by your administrator — see Quality analysis — so the guidance matches your organization's standards.

Check compliance

Beyond writing quality, the requirement can be checked against the regulatory frameworks attached to your project.

Review the requirement's Compliance status.
Address any flagged gaps — a missing attribute, an unmet framework expectation.

Result The requirement is checked against your frameworks during authoring, so compliance is built in rather than reconstructed before a submission. See Frameworks.

Move it forward

Link the requirement to its parents and to the tests that will verify it (see Links).
When it's ready, advance its status or Send for Review (see lifecycle).

Result A clean, linked requirement moving through its lifecycle, with coverage and compliance visible on your dashboards.

Where to go next

To verify the requirement you just wrote, see Build, run & execute tests.