Technical Requirements

Simon Brown was kind enough to comment on my previous post and said,

"I'm trying to tackle the other (easier?) problem of when technical people don't even think about NFRs. First things first, we need technical people to understand why NFRs are important."

There's a very simple way to get technical people to understand why technical requirements are important. They must be clearly and logically linked to delivering a functional requirement. Go one step further and simply remove the distinction between functional requirements and technical requirements by stating how a functional requirement must be delivered in terms of quality-of-service or a service level agreement. An example:

"The customer must be able to securely submit the final order plus payment details and receive an acknowledgment via both email and a following web page in under 10 seconds."

Separating technical and functional requirements makes it all too easy to make the former into an afterthought.