What to do if there are no requirements on the project?

?? First of all I need to highlight 2 points:

1. This article and situation in general is mostly for experienced testers, not beginners. But we believe that it’s useful and interesting for everyone. Especially now, with current requirements for juniors on the market ??

2. In this article we share our personal experience, this is not absolute theory, so your situation can be different and has other solutions.

So you come to the project and there are no requirements. Hope, you understand that this is very bad and should be fixed somehow. But before doing something you should answer on 3 main questions:

1. When?

2. What?

3. Why?

1. How long are there no requirements?

Maybe your BA just has gone on vacation and will come back in 2 weeks. So don’t worry and just wait)

Or BA’s left the project recently and managers are looking for new specialist. Again just wait and keep all existing documentation in order.

And if there are no requirements from the project beginning, this should be corrected.

2. What documentation do you have on the project??

If you expect to see beautiful stories in jira as you read in some internet resources, life can be different. So clarify what documentation exists on the project and where it’s stored. It can be a large file in git, several pages on Confluence or maybe google doc. Or it can be a lot of separate documents for each direction separately - developers, PM.?

So your goal here is to understand what you have, who is responsible for this and is it enough information for your testing.?

3. So if there are no requirements in any form from the very beginning, why did this happen?

Maybe you have a very simple application with 3 month project length so it was decided not to spend time on any type of documentation?

Maybe your team has just 5 members who are sitting in one room together with the customer. Actually this is not an argument against having formalized requirements. Still the project should be short-termed. Otherwize it’s better to have the documentation.

Do you know any other options/stories??

You as QA are responsible for the project quality as well. So having the requirements can help you with many things:

• Communicate with developers, PM, PO, customer
• Justify your point of view on the product quality
• Create good, full testing documentation
• Provide knowledge transfers to ne3w comers
• Store all information in one place with full access of all team mates
• Anything else?

So part of your responsibilities is to organize the process and creation and storage requirements on the project.?

How to do this?

1. Discuss this with the team, collect all feedback, experience and opinions. The best option (what documentation you need and where to store it) depends on your exact project, never use just common rules you find on the internet. Organize the process based on the project specific.?

2. You shouldn’t do this on your own. Distribute the responsibilities between teammates and appoint responsible people.?

3. Improve the process permanently. Never stop. Never think it’s done once and it will work forever. Conduct retrospectives, collect feedback, ask the team if the process and requirements meet expectation, full and correct. Change the points which don’t work.?

In general, requirements are obligatory documentation for each long-term project. Testers’ responsibility is to check if everything is ok with the requirements on the project.