Let's Focus on Features, Not Requirements

by Jim Highsmith

In a recent discussion, a manager kept asking me about requirements management in agile development, and it dawned on me that many traditionalist continue to focus on requirements, whereas agilists focus on features, capabilities, and stories. When we agilists talk about backlog management, we are really talking about feature management (acknowledging there may be more than just stories or features in the backlog). Another client recently showed me his "requirements" -- all 4,000+ of them catalogued in a requirements management tool -- but there wasn't a clear mapping of those requirements to features.