What is Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax?
The Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS) is a mechanism to gently constrain textual requirements. The EARS patterns provide structured guidance that enable authors to write high quality textual requirements. There is a set syntax (structure), with an underlying ruleset. A small number of keywords are used to denote the different clauses of an EARS requirement. The clauses are always in the same order, following temporal logic. The syntax and the keywords closely match common usage of English and are therefore intuitive.
Unstructured natural language (NL) remains the most common format for writing system requirements. However, this approach often leads to ambiguity and misinterpretation—especially when requirements authors lack formal training in best practices. As systems evolve, these unclear requirements cascade through development layers, increasing volatility, introducing risk, and driving up both timelines and costs.
The Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS) addresses these challenges by offering a streamlined, effective framework for writing precise, consistent requirements. EARS is particularly beneficial for global teams, including those for whom English is not a first language. Widely adopted by practitioners across industries, EARS stands out for its simplicity: it requires minimal training, no specialized tooling, and produces clear, readable requirements that reduce rework and accelerate delivery.
How Do I Improve Requirements using Inflectra.ai?
In our last product update, we released the ability to Analyze Requirements against the EARS standard. For example, if we consider the following requirement:
The Inflectra.ai Analysis functionality will provide the following recommendations to improve the requirement:
In this new update we have now added an Improve Description option below the recommendation. If you choose this option, Inflectra.ai will display the following message:
You can now review the updated requirement description on the main page itself:
At this point you can either accept the changes and click Save or reject the changes and click Refresh to reload the original version.
Assuming that you accept the proposed changes, you can see the difference between the two versions in the History tab:
If you want to revert the changes, simply click on Admin View and then revert the change back. The history tab gives you a full audit log of the changes the AI made. Note that we tag the requirement with ai-augmented to denote that it was improved by AI.