diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md
index 8b362216..a2731fac 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTING.md
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md
@@ -8,3 +8,9 @@ Creating the streamz conda environment can be achieved by simply running ```cond
 
 ### Using Conda Environment
 The streamz conda environment can be activated by running ```conda activate streamz_dev```
+
+### Run Software Tests
+```shell
+pip install --editable=. --requirement=requirements-test.txt
+pytest -vvv
+```
diff --git a/requirements-test.txt b/requirements-test.txt
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..d4e29082
--- /dev/null
+++ b/requirements-test.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+# That's a minimal set of packages to satisfy ~1000 test cases
+# of the whole test suite. See also `./ci/*.yml` for full conda
+# environment descriptions.
+
+dask[array,distributed]
+flaky
+ipywidgets
+pandas
+pyarrow
+pytest<9
+requests