Requirements Templates

Over the years I have collected several useful templates for documenting product requirements, each with its advantages and disadvantages. Typically, the intended audience for these documents is the development and QA organizations, but you should indicate if there are any other internal or external readers of this document, such as the customer care team, or partners and vendors.

Template Name	Advantages	Disadvantages
Outline Format (65K Word doc)	Covers not just the product requirements, but all the basic areas of the business that are impacted by the product/feature.	May be challenging to cover all these areas in a single document.
Functional Format (39K Word doc)	Helps break a large product into discrete chunks of functionality, which can make life easier for developers and QA.	Can be challenging to squeeze all functionality into this format.
Questionnaire Format (45K Word doc)	If this product could potentially impact many different parts of a large organization or existing product base, this template ensures that all bases are covered.	If the required product or feature is small in scope, many sections of the template may be redundant.