Conducting Requirement Technical Review from a Test Engineer’s Perspective: Practices and Insights

Preface

With the continuous introduction of new business architectures, the demand for software testing techniques has risen sharply, aiming to maintain stable quality while continuously improving efficiency. Test engineers often focus heavily on development and delivery, neglecting the importance of requirement and design stage reviews. This article, based on the front‑search team’s practice, introduces how test engineers can conduct requirement technical reviews and shares related experiences.

Achieving Consensus

Before launching a requirement technical review, the team must reach internal consensus to align goals.

Iterative Delivery Process

Figure 1: Iterative delivery flowchart. Test engineers participate in development, testing, and release phases but have limited involvement in requirement and design phases.

SDLC Model

Figure 2: Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) flowchart. Because testing follows requirements, any changes in requirements or development can make testing reactive, affecting the whole team as release dates approach.

Test Shift

Figure 3: Test‑shift model. Shifting testing to the requirement, design, and development phases makes test engineers more proactive, helps discover issues earlier, cultivates quality awareness, and provides more time for efficiency improvements.

Requirement Technical Review

The review covers both PRD and technical solution evaluation, aiming to raise the product quality ceiling. Testers assess requirement quality, reasonableness, completeness, and also participate in technical solution design to understand implementation approaches.

Current Situation

Testing Status

Test engineers aim to “maintain quality, increase delivery scope, and relieve time pressure” in each iteration. Factors influencing quality include requirement review thoroughness, solution rationality, test case granularity, test method completeness, development quality, team skill level, and cross‑team collaboration.

Figure 4: Dimensions that ensure quality.

Improvement Space

Retrospectives reveal pain points such as unclear requirements, insufficient test/validation data preparation, and lack of emergency plans for urgent situations.

Figure 5: Areas for improvement.

Implementation Plan

In practice, the team strengthens requirement technical review during requirement review meetings, making entry and exit criteria more reasonable, controllable, and predictable. The review targets the product requirement document and the R&D technical solution, focusing on description, dependencies, impact scope, non‑functional requirements, and security risks.

Roles and responsibilities within the team are clearly defined.

Figure 6: Role responsibility matrix in requirement technical review.

Common review elements for functional and non‑functional requirements are summarized, and each module tailors the elements to its business characteristics and team culture.

Figure 7: Common review elements.

Results Achieved

The team combines offline review meetings with the “Qingtian” platform for requirement analysis, tracking results each iteration. After several trial iterations, notable improvements were observed:

Clear definition of “what to review”, “how to review”, and “review pass criteria”.

Alignment with common review elements positively impacted schedule management and test quality.

Team responsibilities became explicit, and both requirement quantity and quality showed a spiral‑up trend.

Some shortcomings remain, such as fine‑tuning the implementation plan and adapting review elements to specific business scenarios, which will be optimized over time.

Figure 8: Qingtian platform requirement analysis.

Future Outlook

Looking ahead, test engineers will not only ensure production‑line quality stability but also lead and coordinate cross‑role efforts to uphold product quality. As user expectations for shopping experience rise and business demands increase in frequency, guaranteeing quality in a fast‑paced environment becomes a professional challenge. Test shift is an emerging concept, and the requirement technical review methodology offers a practical approach; both aim to continuously explore and refine processes that ensure product quality, shaping the future role of test engineers as “T‑shaped” or “cross‑functional” talent.

Hope this article provides useful thoughts and inspiration.