This paper (1) describes what the current literature identifies as qualities of good software requirements, (2) identifies and examines different categories of software requirement methods, and (3) concludes that methods used to develop software requirements, though not perfect, have advantages that can improve the development of requirements for any type of system. Twelve requirement qualities were identified from the literature and these were used to establish evaluation criteria for software requirement development methods. Three methods selected for evaluation were the Hatley‐Pirbhai method (1988), the CoRE (Consortium Requirements Engineering, SPC, 1992), and Requirements State Machine Language (RSML) develop by Leveson (1990). None of these method stands out as being superior and each have strengths and weaknesses depending upon the application, but each offers improvements over the text based methods used in traditional systems engineering efforts to create function/requirement sets.