Will developers have the need to write and manage requirements in the future?
By A. Perico
2 min read
As software development evolves, one thing remains constant: the need to write and manage requirements. From defining project goals to aligning with customer needs, requirements are foundational across industries. While AI and automation are reshaping how we manage them, human expertise remains essential. This article explores why requirements still matter, how technology is transforming the process, and what the future holds for this critical discipline.
Will Developers Have the Need to Write and Manage Requirements in the Future?
Yes. The more useful question is not whether developers will need requirements in the future, but how directly they will be involved in shaping, refining, checking, and managing them. In many organizations they already are, whether the process admits it or not. When system definition arrives late, incompletely, or ambiguously, developers start writing the real requirements through code, tickets, and implementation choices.
That is one reason the idea that developers can simply wait for finished requirements has become less realistic over time. Modern software systems move too quickly and are too interconnected for developers to stay completely downstream from definition work.
Requirements are not going away because system intent is not going away
No tool trend changes the basic need to define what a system should do, under which constraints, for which users, and how success will be judged. That is still requirements work even when the artifacts change shape.
The Scrum Guide says the Product Backlog is “an emergent, ordered list of what is needed to improve the product,” but it is still a representation of work, not a replacement for all system definition.
Developers will keep needing requirements because implementation still needs governing intent. Without that, software teams just optimize for the clearest local signal available.
AI will change the mechanics, not remove the responsibility
AI will help draft, review, decompose, compare, and critique requirements. That is real leverage. NIST’s AI RMF is useful here because it frames AI as something that should improve trustworthy development, not replace judgment blindly.
NIST says the AI RMF is intended to improve the ability to incorporate “trustworthiness considerations into the design, development, use, and evaluation of AI products, services, and systems.”
That is the right way to think about AI in requirements work as well. It will increase speed and expose weaknesses earlier, but it will not remove the need for people who understand context, tradeoffs, and consequences.
Developers will increasingly curate and challenge requirements
The future role is likely less about manually writing every requirement from scratch and more about curating, refining, validating, and tracing requirement intent through delivery. Developers are often best positioned to challenge unverifiable language, impossible constraints, or architectural contradictions before the system absorbs them.
That does not mean developers replace systems engineers or product roles. It means the boundary becomes more collaborative, not less. Requirements quality will increasingly depend on faster technical feedback from the people closest to realization.
Final thought
Developers will still need to write and manage requirements in the future because systems still need explicit intent, and implementation still exposes the gaps in that intent.
AI may write more first drafts. Developers will still be needed to decide whether those drafts actually define the right system.