Functional and Non-functional Requirements Specification for Enterprise Applications

Comprehensive and accurate software requirements capture is essential for successful development of software systems. Enterprise applications have an additional challenge of eliciting requirements that need to be well understood by i) the business users of the system having extensive domain knowledge ii) application developers having extensive system implementation and development knowledge. Current tools vary from providing textual descriptions to formal semantic languages for specifying requirements. The business users are unable to actively participate in the analysis, as formal and textual specifications represent two extreme ends of requirements elicitation. Ambiguity or lack of understanding often poses a challenge on validation and verification of system requirements specification. The paper presents a Use case Specification Framework that brings structure to requirements specification while retaining its simplicity. The framework enables business users to understand and verify functional requirements and two critical non functional requirements – performance and usability.