Functional and non-functional requirements in Software development - Essay Example

Functional and non-functional Requirements Development of quality and satisfactory software projects is always the maingoal of any software development team. In other words, software developers have to implement a number of strategic techniques necessary for developing a system that satisfies the targeted functionalities. Some of the most crucial factors to be put into close consideration in the development of a system are the functional and non-functional requirements (Aggarwal, 2005). In simple terms, functional requirements entail a set of features or characteristics that define how a particular system is supposed to operate and deliver outputs.

This involves the set of actions that clarify what exactly a particular system has to do. On the other hand, non-functional requirements engross the system constraints that define how it will do the functional requirements. It acts as a criterion for elaborating the performance of a particular system (Yang, 2010). The functional and non-functional requirements of any system always have a huge effect on the development life cycle. To be precise, all through the development life cycle of a system, functional requirements as the main subject of concern in each phase (Mishra & Mohanty, 2012).

Right from the first phase, requirements analysis, to, maintenance phase, functional requirements act as the basis for each phase. That is, each phase, must ensure that the predefined functional requirements satisfy what the user is expected to get from the system. In this sense, functional requirements always define the amount of time to be spent in the system development life cycle (Shelly & Rosenblatt, 2012). A crucial example of functional requirements is, adding a new order into a web-based order entry system.

This functionality requires a number of key attributes to be defined and they include, order name, its identification, time it was processed among others as stipulated in the requirements analysis phase. Therefore, as soon as this functional requirement is defined, then, throughout the development life cycle the developer must ensure that its features are perfectly satisfied until a final output product is delivered (Milanovic, 2011). One of the major non-functional requirements is efficiency.

As stipulated earlier, non-functional requirements include the constraints that will elaborate how a system is to meet the pre defined functional requirements. To the development life cycle, efficiency depends on the outputs of the functional requirements. In this sense, non-functional requirements have very little effect on the development life cycle since it is a feature that is used to grade the functional requirements upon full integration of system modules (Shelly & Rosenblatt, 2012). Details captured in the requirements analysis and specification details act as the building block into tracking whether or not they are satisfied.

That is, the whole set of operations that the targeted system is expected to deliver are always defined in the first two phases. Therefore, this information should be used in tracking of the functional requirements. Along side this, tracking of the non-functional requirements can be performed by testing the ability of each system module to satisfy each of the predefined functional requirements (Aggarwal, 2005). It is vital to note that, any professional responsible for drawing of system requirements, functional and non functional requirements can perfectly be tracked through design of a use case diagram and ensuring that each of the tasks defined in the diagram are accomplished (Mishra & Mohanty, 2012).

ReferencesAggarwal, K. K. (2005). Software engineering. S.l.: New Age IntL Publishers.Milanovic, N. (2011). Non-functional properties in service oriented architecture: Requirements, models and methods. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.Mishra, J., & Mohanty, A. (2012). Software engineering. New Delhi, India: Dorling Kindersley.Shelly, G. B., & Rosenblatt, H. J. (2012). Systems analysis and design. Boston: Course Technology Cengage Learning.Yang, S. C. (2010). OFDMA System Analysis and Design.

Norwood: Artech House.