Before TALKING about the traditional requirements, let’s understand what a USER STORY is. Nowadays, if you are in an agile organization, everyone would be talking in terms of user stories.

User stories are short descriptions of functionality told from the user’s perspective where the focus is on why and how. The user story concentrates on the EXPERIENCE — what the person USING the product wants to be able to do. A traditional requirement concentrates on functionality — what the product should do, it talks more in terms of the ability of a product. Traditional requirements documents go into excessive detail on how an area of software should be designed. They typically provide instructions to the software team on how to build it. Requirements documents often contain things like executive summaries, scope, risks, and more. In contrast to the traditional requirements, a user story is a much simple with acceptance criteria to define the completion. Also, a user story talks about what exactly is the user’s need at the very lowest level of implementation.