Non-Functional Requirements

When we talk about requirements, we are almost always talking about functional requirements.  i.e. the features.  Features deal with WHAT the application is supposed to do.  However, there is another classification of requirements called non-functional requirements.  These fall into the following categories:

• Usability – the human factors such as aesthetics, ease of learning, ease of use, and consistency of the user interface.
• Reliability – frequency and severity of failure, recoverability, predictability, and accuracy.
• Performance – transaction rate, speed, availability, accuracy, response time, recovery time, or memory usage.
• Supportability – testability and maintainability.  This is important to Quality assurance personnel and system administrators.

NOTE: The actual categorization is not important when documenting non-functional requirements.  For example, there is not much use in debating whether a requirement is a reliability or performance requirement.  The list simply exists as a mental check list of perspectives to keep in mind when looking for requirements.

Unfortunately, these non-functional requirements are rarely considered in estimates.  Exploring non-functional requirements is just as important as exploring functional requirements and can sometimes affect the cost and effort required by orders of magnitude.  For example, if a server needs to have 99.9% uptime the cost is substantially less than a server that needs to be up 99.999% of the time.  Instead of thousands of dollars per year, you may need to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Here are some examples of non-functional requirements

• System must support up to 100,000 total users
• System must support up to 1,000 simultaneous users
• System must support up to 1,000 tasks per user (100 million total tasks)
• System must support up to 100 projects per user
• System must support up to 1,000 tasks per project
• System must be accessible on desktop and mobile devices
• System must be understandable and usable by users without any documentation or training
• System must respond to user requests in 2 seconds or less
• System must be hosted on Rackspace (production)
• System must run on exactly one VM (to reduce operations costs)
• System must work on 90% of all browsers used in the U.S.
• System must be up 99.9% of the time (normal operation and maintenance)
• System must support disaster recovery of no more than 1 day of downtime
• System must be easily supported.  No more than 1 FTE support personnel
• System must be easily maintainable.  Respond to most feature requests in less than 1 week and bug fixes in less than 2 days.