Thoughts about the Quality of Requirements

A requirement is born on the head of a person as an idea and evolves over multiple stages into a bunch of tasks on the developer's desk.

The customer thinks: "He's if we have a button here, which does trigger this action, work would be much better. Let's ask for this!" The project management use the knowledge about the big picture and their deep knowledge about the product and includes this into a Specification, which in the end is approved by the customer. This specification is split into epics, which are divided further until we end up with stories for the development team.

We see a lot of transformation, grouping and splitting. Usually, these steps are done by multiple individuals in different roles. In different projects I've seen the same effect: The path which the customer's idea takes from the customer to the development team determines the stories quality. Low-quality stories are bad on multiple layers. In the best case, they lead to frustration because of a lot of back questions. In the worst case, they lead to bad implementations or even nonsense…

To address this problem I can think of a definition of ready at every level. Does any have this kind of definition up to the customer? Or are they only in your mind? Is anybody aware of metrics to measure the quality of epics, stories and so on?