Business Analysis: Functional Non-Functional Requirements

Functional and Non-functional Requirements Can Make or Break Your Project

Business and Stakeholder Requirements define the business need in business terminology that all involved parties can understand, but the devil lies in the detail. Solution Providers (i.e., those responsible for building, buying, assembling, or configuring an IT application) need to know what the application must do, what data it will deal with, and what qualities it must possess to meet the business needs. In other words, they need Functional and Non-functional (aka Solution) Requirements at a level of detail that most subject matter experts can only provide when prompted and led.  

In this course, you will learn simple and repeatable techniques for extracting solution-level specifications from business and stakeholder requirements that are expressed in complete sentence form. Applying the presented techniques will help you identify specific functions the solution needs. You will also discover hidden non-functional needs (e.g., performance, usability, reliability, etc.) related to the functions.  

My co-author, Angela, and I have used these techniques on hundreds of IT projects around the globe and we know the value each provides. Using these approaches will improve your ability to identify and document requirements at the level of detail that solution providers (vendors or developers) need to deliver the right technology for their organization.  

The presented techniques will work on any set of well-expressed requirement statements. However, they were specifically designed for and work best with requirement statements that follow the “Rules for Writing Effective Requirements” that we present in our course “Writing Requirements for IT – Simply Put!”.  

Regardless of your job title or role, if you are involved in defining future business solutions, this book will help you communicate your business needs to solution providers. It will reduce the potential for misunderstandings that undermine IT’s ability to deliver the right technology for the business.  

How to get the most out of this book?  

To maximize the learning effect, you will have optional, online exercises to assess your understanding of each presented technique. Chapter titles prefaced with the phrase “Exercise” contain a link to online exercises with immediate feedback featuring our recommended resolution and the rationale behind it.

These exercises are optional and they do not “test” your knowledge in the conventional sense. Their purpose is to demonstrate the use of the technique more real-life than our explanations can supply. You need Internet access to perform the exercises. We hope you enjoy them and that they make it easier for you to apply the techniques in real life.