Requirements development includes everything relating to finalising the content of requirements. It is separate activity to requirements management, which ‘manages’ the requirements once they have been defined.

Depending on the system level and project constraints, requirements development can begin with the elicitation of stakeholders. If high-level specifications already exist, suitable analysis and technical solutions will allow requirements for the sub-systems to be derived. In each case, always within the scope of development for the respective level of the system.

A suitably precise way needs to be determined for documenting the requirements that have been elicited or derived using an appropriate notation (see for example HCM for the natural language).