https://theappsolutions.
com/blog/development/functional-vs-non-
functional-requirements/
Functional Role in SDLC:
Imagine that you want to build a house. It should be two-stored, have a red
roof, and several windows. But what about the number of rooms, the color of
the walls and the style of the house? Should it be mid-century modern or even
Scandinavian? You need to clarify many aspects to make the result meet your
requirements.
The same applies to mobile app development. A detailed vision of the project
helps business analysts and project managers create better product
documentation in the short term. On another hand, if the team needs to clarify
information during the development stage, development time and costs might
increase, as well as the probability that the project may fail.
How can you avoid this?
Simply by defining functional and non-functional requirements for the project.
While functional requirements might be quite clear, some of the non-functional
requirements are hard to specify.
For instance:
How do we know what acceptable “performance” should look like?
Or
How can we define “maintainability” before any code has been written?
If you want to decrease the project's cost, increase the development of team
productivity, and develop a successful and cost-effective project, read on.
Below, we share information on what requirements you need to clarify with a
business analyst, functional and nonfunctional requirement examples, and
handy tips on how to specify non-functional requirements.
How requirements impact the software
development process?
As mentioned, clearly defined requirements are the key to project success.
These requirements also help the development team and client to ensure they
are working to reach the same goals. Failing to define requirements may
cause miscommunication between the team and client, and increase the
chances of the project failing.
But wait – there’s more:
68% of projects with effective communication, and precise
requirements, are likely to deliver project scope and meet
quality standards successfully.
At the same time, 32% of IT projects failed due to sparse
estimation during the planning phase and unclear
requirements.
Besides, unclear requirements increase the project timeline
and budget up to 60%.
Also, unclear requirements consume over 41% of the IT
development budget for software, staff, and external
professional services.
Detailed functional and nonfunctional requirements in software
engineering help the team to complete the following tasks:
Define the terms and roles. Requirements help to ensure that the
development team and stakeholders are on the same page to avoid
misunderstandings in the future.
Reduce communication time. Close cooperation with BA ensures
much clearer requirements and less development time. Such an
approach reduces the time required for communication during the
development stage, as well as the project's cost.
Make the project estimation more precise. Detailed requirements
help us to estimate the development time and cost more accurately.
See the possible mistakes beforehand. When the team visualizes the
project details during the discovery (inception) phase, they may
identify errors in the initial stage of development. Therefore, they
save your time and budget.
Create more predictable projects. High-quality requirements and
wireframes help to predict the result and develop the project that
meets your expectations.
To conclude, detailed requirements help developers and
stakeholders to find a common language, save money and time for
development, as well as create a project that meets business needs
and expectations.
Now we'll move on and learn more about project requirement types.
Classification of requirements
To turn your business idea into a working solution, you need to
clarify the following:
Business requirements include high-level statements of goals,
objectives, and needs of your project.
Stakeholder requirements help to find what you expect from a
particular solution.
Solution requirements describe the product characteristics that will
meet your expectations and business needs. They include:
Functional requirements describe ways a product must
behave
Nonfunctional requirements, also known as quality attributes,
describe the general software characteristics
Functional Vs Non-Functional
Requirements: The Comparison Table
If you still have a question about the difference between functional
and non-functional requirements, check the table below:
Functional Non-Functional
Parameters Requirement Requirement
Requirement It is mandatory It is non-mandatory
It is captured in the It is captured as a
Capturing type use case. quality attribute.
End-result Product feature Product properties
Capturing Easy to capture Hard to capture
Objective Helps you verify the Helps you to verify the
functionality of the performance of the
software. software.
Concentrates on the
Focuses on user user's expectation and
Area of focus requirement experience.
Describe what the Describes how the
Documentation product does product works
Product Info Product Features Product Properties
Functional requirements
Such requirements describe system behavior under specific
conditions and include the product features and functions
which web & app developers must add to the solution. Such
requirements should be precise both for the development team and
stakeholders.
The list of examples of functional requirements includes:
Business Rules
Transaction corrections, adjustments, and cancellations
Administrative functions
Authentication
Authorization levels
Audit Tracking
External Interfaces
Certification Requirements
Reporting Requirements
Historical Data
If your team uses Agile methodology, they will design most of the
requirements in written form. Still, to present some requirements
more clearly, the team can visualize them.
The functional requirements may appear in the following forms:
Functional requirements specification document
The documentation includes detailed descriptions of the product's
functions and capabilities. These could be a single functional
requirements document or other documents, such as user stories
and use cases.
As well as the form, the specification document must consist of the
following sections:
Purpose. This section includes background, definitions, and system
overview.
Overall description. The description document consists of product
vision, business rules, and assumptions.
Specific requirements. The requirements might be database
requirements, system attributes, and functional requirements.
Here is a project definition example:
“Admin dashboard - a web portal allowing Admin to view and
manage Applicants and Customers, Drivers, vehicles, manage car
models, prices, and review statistics from both mobile platforms.”
Use cases
Use cases describe the interaction between the system and external
users that leads to achieving particular goals.
Each use case includes three main elements:
Actors are the users who will interact with your product.
Example:
“Applicant - a person who wants to use the App and applies for
registration.
Customer - a person who was approved for registration and can use
the App.
Driver - a person, who was registered in the Driver app and fulfills
ride orders for
Members received from the App.”
System functional requirements describe the intended
behavior of the product.
Example:
“Payment System charges Customer for the ride.”
Goals describe all interactions between the users and the
system.
Example:
“When the journey is over, Driver marks it has ended in their app.”
User stories
User stories are documented descriptions of software features from
the end-user perspective. The document describes scenarios of how
the user engages with the solution.
Example:
“As a Customer, I want to select a car from the carousel so that I
can complete the order. ”.
If the development team uses Agile methodology, they will organize
user stories in a backlog, an ordered list of product functions.
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Functional decomposition
A functional decomposition or work breakdown structure (WBS)
illustrates how complex processes and features break into simpler
components. By using the WBS approach, the team can analyze
each part of the project while capturing the full project picture.
Example:
Image source: Batimes
Mobile app prototypes
By using prototypes, stakeholders and teams clarify the project
vision and complicated areas of products in development. The
development team also uses prototypes to represent how the
solution will work and give examples of how users will interact with
it.
There are two types of prototypes:
Throwaway prototypes that can be cheap and fast visual
representations of requirements
Image source: Justuxdesign
Evolutionary prototypes, more complex ones, that can later
even become the early versions of the product or the MVP.
Image source: The App Solutions
Non-functional requirements examples
What is a non-functional requirement?
The definition of non-functional requirements is quality attributes
that describe ways your product should behave. The list of basic
non-functional requirements includes:
Usability
Usability is the degree of ease with which the user will interact with
your products to achieve required goals effectively and efficiently.
Legal or Regulatory Requirements
Legal or regulatory requirements describe product adherence to
laws. If your product violates these regulations, it may result in legal
punishment, including federal fines.
For example, look at legal requirements for our recent project, a
mobile taxi platform:
“To operate in London, the platform should be licensed by the local
transport authority - Transport for London.”
Reliability
Such a metric shows the possibility of your solution to fail. To
achieve high reliability, your team should eliminate all bugs that
may influence the code safety and issues with system components.
Performance
Performance describes how your solution behaves when users
interact with it in various scenarios. Poor performance may lead to a
negative user experience and jeopardize system safety.
Example:
“The application shows cars nearby for three seconds.”
As we said, some non-functional requirements are not so distinct
and might be missed by the team and stakeholders due to:
Subjective nature. Different users can view, interpret, and evaluate
Nonfunctional characteristics in different ways.
Integrated nature. The goals of one non-functional requirement may
conflict with another since they typically have a broad effect on
systems.
Don’t know what they [NFRs] are. Unclear terminology, confusing
definitions, and the absence of a universally accepted classification
scheme make understanding of non-functional requirements a
challenge.
Assuming that “Everybody knows.” During the discovery (inception)
phase, both the client and the team might forget about some non-
functional requirements because some of them are hard to define
from the perspective of a business idea. Therefore, they might arise
only after the project release.
Still, non-functional requirements mark the difference between a
development project’s success and its failure.
How to define non-functional requirements
To determine the majority of non-functional requirements, you
should:
Use a defined classification and classify them into three
groups: operation, revision, and transition. In this way, the
stakeholders and the development team build a consistent
language for discussing non-functional needs.
With a list of pre-defined elicitation questions, you may
increase the development teams productivity. Besides, you
can save time when preparing for elicitation interviews and
workshops.
Engage with the development team during the requirements
definition to ensure that you are on the same page with the
development team.
Use 'Invented Wheels' and reuse the requirements written for
other systems, since software systems have a lot in common
when comparing nonfunctional requirements.
Use automated testing tools such as Selenium, TestComplete,
and Appium. Such tools will help to check your product
performance faster and reveal more non-functional
requirements.
Final words
Precise functional and non-functional requirements are essential to
reduce development costs because, when the requirements are
clear, the team can develop the project much faster. The difference
between functional and non-functional requirements is as follows:
Functional requirements are easy to define because the business
idea drives them. They include all the features of your future project
and the ways users engage with it.
Experience drives Non-functional requirements. In order, to identify
them, you need to analyze the product's performance and make it
convenient and useful. Such requirements may appear when the
product is being used on a regular basis.
In this way, while functional requirements describe what the system
does, non-functional requirements describe how the system works.
To receive assistance from business analysts and define your project
requirements, contact us.
