Critical success factors for business initiatives are the creation of precise functional requirements, defining the behavior of the system, and NFRs, which describe how the system will accomplish its goals. The business stakeholders may define functional requirements well, but be challenged when it comes to non-functional requirements. If you ask the business stakeholders the right questions, you should be able to achieve a better alignment between business and IT.

In software development, the gathering of requirements is the first step. Functional requirements describe the behaviors of the application that support the business goals, and NFRs include constraints and qualities. Just as with tracking the functional requirements to closure during the different phases of software development, it is imperative for the success of any IT engagement to elicit, document, and track NFRs from the beginning through to closure.

The key topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

• Elicitations and discovery
• NFR prioritization and cost benefit analysis
• Analysis, KPIs and metrics and NFR SDLC

NFRs have a life cycle which starts with the requirements definition, moves to the solution design and implementation, and finishes with quality assurance. The NFR life cycle phases mentioned later in this chapter will apply to each software quality attribute. Creating artefacts for NFRs will bring efficiencies to the software life cycle, via leveraging best practices, standards and re-use. The NFR life cycle defines a proper flow from generic goals to specific attributes that will help in requirements charting and traceability.