It’s often difficult to prioritize customer requirements, especially for testers who are new to the testing industry. Customer expectation keeps on changing and it’s very important to identify and categorize requirements for the customer’s satisfaction.
You can consider dividing the requirements under written, expected, and desirable categories.
Written Requirements
Requirements that are usually mentioned in the product documentation and design plans are considered as written requirements. These requirements can also be expressed verbally with the customers.
While working with such requirements, it is required to run several negative checks against each one. If the product fails to satisfy any of the requirements, it’s better to go back and fix it before arriving at the testing stage. Moreover, developers must verify the written requirements with many automated checks.
Expected Requirements
These are obvious and understood requirements and don’t require to be written down. Here, the customer expects you to understand the requirements.
Tester must have a better understanding of the customer problems and software technologies being used. However, when you fail to realize the requirement, you must mention why the client must include the requirements and how it can affect their product.
Desirable Requirements
Sometimes, customers depend on your tech competence to make the product perfect. These are the situations when the customers are not sure about the how their product will look like. However, these requirements show your responsibility towards the project as well as your testing expertise.
It requires you to get the customer’s preferences accurately and could prove tricky at times. You can try studying the customer’s behavior by using different UX research techniques. Here, the failure gives you an opportunity to learn and make the product better.
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