Functional and non-functional requirements in Software development Essay

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