Software requirements

Requirements of a software form the foundation of the software based product.

Functional and non-functional requirements are derived from the "voice of the customer" (VOC), documents (artifacts) and similar products etc. Success of the software product mainly depends on the non-functional requirements like

• performance – time taken to perform an operation (throughput) and memory usage
• scalability - ability to easily expanded or upgraded on demand
• usability – ease of use and intuitiveness
• architecture – standalone or client server
• reliability - ability to yield same result on repeated trials
• security – ability to protect the system from intruders and protecting the privacy of the users of the software product
• etc.

and the productivity of software development mainly depends on the non-functional requirements like

• maintainability (includes extensibility, testability)
• etc.

Make sure the derived requirements are

• simple
• not ambiguous
• testable

Following are the minimum set of attributes of a requirement

1. Tag – Requirement tag will be used for traceability (e.g. R1, R2, REQ1, REQ10, FR1, FR10, etc.)
2. Description