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Saturday, February 5, 2011

Non Functional Requirement

Non-functional requirements are attributes that either the system or the  environment must have. Such requirements are not always in the front of  stakeholders' minds, and often you must make a special effort to draw them out.
 To make it easier to capture non-functional requirements, we organize them into  five categories:
1.Usability
2.Reliability
3.Performance
4.Supportability
5.Security

Usability describes the ease with which the system can be  learned or used. A typical usability requirement might state:
•The system should allow novice users to install and operate it with  little or no training.
•The end user shall be able to place an order within thirty seconds.
•The end user shall be able to access any page within four seconds.


Reliability describes the degree to which the system must  work for users. Specifications for reliability typically refer to availability,  mean time between failures, mean time to repair, accuracy, and maximum  acceptable bugs. For example:
•The system shall meet the terms of a Service Level Agreement.
•The mean time to failure shall be at least four months.

Performance specifications typically refer to response  time, transaction throughput, and capacity. For example:
•All Web pages must download within three seconds during an average  load, and five seconds during a peak load.
•While executing a search, the system must be able to display 500  search results per page.

Supportability refers to the software's  ability to be easily modified or maintained to accommodate typical usage or  change scenarios. For instance, in our help desk example, how easy should it be
 to add new applications to the support framework? Here are some examples of  supportability requirements:
•The system shall allow users to create new workflows without the  need for additional programming.
•The system shall allow the system administrator to create and  populate tax tables for the upcoming tax year.

Security refers to the ability to prevent and/or forbid  access to the system by unauthorized parties. Some examples of security  requirements are:
•User authentication shall be via the corporate Single Signon  system.
•Only authorized payroll administrators shall be permitted to access  employee pay information.

In Other Words

 Nonfunctional requirements refer to elements that are related to the product but don’t describe the product directly.

Also , often Non-Functional requirements are referred to as 'Technical requirements' or 'Performance requirements'.

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