Non-functional requirements

Every system has requirements, that the system must comply to. Creating a list of these requirements for a new system is not a simple task. There are special applications on the market for documenting an correlating requirements for development- and test purposes.

Most requirements are functional requirements. They state what the system should do, like "After inserting a new customer order, the system must print a order confirmation".

Besides functional requirements, there are non-functional requirements. These requirements are sometimes called the "-abilities". Some examples of non-functional requirements are: 

  • Availability
  • Scalability
  • Reliability
  • Stability

Besides these -abilities the following are also non-functional requirements:

  • Cost/ licensing
  • Security
  • Uptime
  • Robustness
  • Documentation
  • etc

Users of systems usually don not state these requirements explicitly, but they do have expectations about them.

It is the task of the IT architect or requirements engineer to find these implicit requirements. This can be very hard. Things that are obvious to the customers or end-users, are not always obvious to others. Not to forget the non-functional requirements that system administrators have, like the existence of backup windows.

A large part of the budget of building the system can be determined by non-functional requirements ("The system obviously must work seamlessly with the existing systems" or "The website should always be available"). Therefore it is very important to quantify these requirements to make them explicit: How bad would it be if the website was not available for 5 minutes per day?" What if it will take $500.000 to satisfy this requirement? Is it still important then?

It is important to remember that the acceptance of a system is largely dependent of the implemented non-functional requirements. A website can be very beautiful and functional, but if loading the site (a non-functional requirement) takes 30 seconds, your customers are gone!


This entry was posted on Thursday 13 September 2007

Earlier articles

Quantum computing

Security at cloud providers not getting better because of government regulation

The cloud is as insecure as its configuration

Infrastructure as code

DevOps for infrastructure

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

(Hyper) Converged Infrastructure

Object storage

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

What's the point of using Docker containers?

Identity and Access Management

Using user profiles to determine infrastructure load

Public wireless networks

Supercomputer architecture

Desktop virtualization

Stakeholder management

x86 platform architecture

Midrange systems architecture

Mainframe Architecture

Software Defined Data Center - SDDC

The Virtualization Model

What are concurrent users?

Performance and availability monitoring in levels

UX/UI has no business rules

Technical debt: a time related issue

Solution shaping workshops

Architecture life cycle

Project managers and architects

Using ArchiMate for describing infrastructures

Kruchten’s 4+1 views for solution architecture

The SEI stack of solution architecture frameworks

TOGAF and infrastructure architecture

The Zachman framework

An introduction to architecture frameworks

How to handle a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack

Architecture Principles

Views and viewpoints explained

Stakeholders and their concerns

Skills of a solution architect architect

Solution architects versus enterprise architects

Definition of IT Architecture

What is Big Data?

How to make your IT "Greener"

What is Cloud computing and IaaS?

Purchasing of IT infrastructure technologies and services

IDS/IPS systems

IP Protocol (IPv4) classes and subnets

Infrastructure Architecture - Course materials

Introduction to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)

Fire prevention in the datacenter

Where to build your datacenter

Availability - Fall-back, hot site, warm site

Reliabilty of infrastructure components

Human factors in availability of systems

Business Continuity Management (BCM) and Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

Performance - Design for use

Performance concepts - Load balancing

Performance concepts - Scaling

Performance concept - Caching

Perceived performance

Ethical hacking

The first computers

Open group ITAC /Open CA Certification


Recommended links

Ruth Malan
Gaudi site
Esther Barthel's site on virtualization
Eltjo Poort's site on architecture


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The postings on this site are my opinions and do not necessarily represent CGI’s strategies, views or opinions.

 

Copyright Sjaak Laan