What capabilities does a requirements engineer need, and why are most of them not technical?
Analytic thinking, quick thinking and thinking out of the box, plus a stack of people skills — empathy, communication, conflict resolution, moderation, self-confidence and persuasiveness — because the work is extracting and reconciling what people want, not building it.
* The nine capabilities sorted by the job each one does — not one of them is a coding skill. *
The nine capabilities sort into four jobs the role actually performs:
- Understand the problem — analytic thinking to take a messy domain apart, and thinking out of the box to notice the requirement nobody stated because everybody assumed it.
- Get it out of people's heads — empathy to grasp what a stakeholder means rather than what they literally said, communication skills to put it back in words they will recognise, and quick thinking to follow up in the moment, because the interesting remark passes and the meeting ends.
- Get people to agree — moderation skills to run a room full of people with different agendas towards a decision, and conflict resolution skills for the point where two stakeholders want incompatible things and someone has to lose.
- Hold the line — self-confidence and persuasiveness, because the requirements engineer is regularly the only person in the room arguing for something inconvenient.
That last pair is what security work runs on. Functional requirements have a champion — someone wants that feature and will fight for it. Security requirements usually have none: they cost money and time, nobody asked for them, and the person raising them is the obstacle in everyone else's plan. Persuasiveness is the skill that converts "the analyst mentioned it" into "the project agreed to it".
Tip: Read the list next to the reason a developer is a poor fit for the role — the overlap with coding skill is close to zero, which is the point.
Go deeper:
Facilitator (Wikipedia) — moderation as an actual discipline: staying neutral while steering a room to a decision.