I can even take up a course which gives guidelines on how to perfectly write a requirement document which I can attach to a jira epic?

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    Hi Zankhana, what do you understand as a requirement document? A thorough explanation of what's needed to be implemented, with use cases, happy and alternative paths, etc? – Tiago Cardoso Mar 8 at 8:19

In Scrum, we typically don't worry very much about writing requirements, let alone documents.

Scrum calls for a couple requirements "artifacts": the Product Backlog and the Sprint Backlog. The Product Backlog is maintained by the Product Owner and is a ranked wishlist of all features. The Sprint Backlog is maintained by the team and consists of those items, pulled from the Product Backlog, which the team has committed to for a given sprint.

The items that comprise the backlogs are typically called Product Backlog Items (PBIs). They're often in the form of user stories, bite-sized requirements that represent some unit of value to the user. They typically take the form:

AS A Salesperson, (role/actor)
I WANT to view a list of all my clients, (requirement)
SO I can plan my daily contacts (rationale)

User stories are accompanied by acceptance criteria, for example:

List of clients is sorted by last name.
Archived clients are not displayed.
List shows first name, last name, and e-mail address.

And that's pretty much it for requirements in the Scrum world.


As others have mentions, the writing of requirements is a fairly minor part of Scrum. One could even argue that it is largely optional. However, this doesn't tell the whole story. The Product Owner in scrum has a much bigger job than writing requirements. They are responsible for ensuring that the backlog is healthy and prioritized, connecting a customer group to the Scrum Team,maximizing ROI of every sprint, and more. You can basically think of them as the CEO for the product.

You asked about a course and I would look at the Scrum Alliance's Certified Scrum Product Owner course as a good starting point. Scrum is a pretty big paradigm shift so there is a lot different to get used to.


There are many books and courses where you can learn about agile requirements. Three ideas:

  1. "Growing Agile: A Coach's Guide to Agile Requirements" by Samantha Laing and Karen Greaves
  2. "User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development" by Mike Cohn
  3. RE@Agile - IREB (requirements) training for Agile projects
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    Hi kris, welcome to pm.se. We strongly discourage link-only answers, as they might become broken in the future. Could you please then restructure your answer to be kept useful even if all links are obsolete? Otherwise the community we'll flag your answer for removal. Check our help center for more info. Cheers – Tiago Cardoso Apr 15 at 9:59
  • @TiagoCardoso thank you for your feedback. Of course I will improve my answer! – kriscorbus Apr 15 at 10:09

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