Chaps associated with
the software development whether they are software engineers, business analyst
or software quality assurance professionals are often confused about Business and
Functional Requirements and are not easily able to distinguish from one
another.
Let’s describe
Business and Functional Requirements briefly followed by short scenario to get
it right more clearly.
Business
Requirement:
Any objective
business or organization wants to achieve from software application. It could
be single line statement or set of statements.
e.g. Pakistan
Government wants to take all of its operations online and each ministry will
have its separate online portal to cater respective population needs.
Presence of each
business requirement in software applications is critical to its success.
Functional
Requirement:
All the explicitly stated
user requirements are considered as Functional Requirements. Also, any
requirement that helps in achieving business objective but not specifically put
forward by user is also considered as functional requirement.
e.g. Authentication
required to login to application. Page load time shall not increase from 5
seconds.
Presence of each functional
requirement in software applications may or may not be critical to its success.
Let’s take a
following short scenario to understand practically the difference between
business and functional requirements.
“Ministry of
Education, Pakistan has decided to formulate the ratio between Pakistan’s States
(Sind, Punjab, Baluchistan, KP and Kashmir) about population’s education and
level of education (undergrads, grads and postgrads etc.) and devised a form
for that purpose.”
In the above
statement “education ratio between states population” is the business objective
(business requirement) Ministry of Education wants to achieve. For that purpose,
provision (i.e. user is able to select or provide his/her state he/she lives
in) of States in the application is a success criteria of the
application. Now, Functional requirement in this scenario is that Combo Box (pre-filled with states Sind,
Punjab etc. user may select one out of available choices) or Textbox (user may type in his/her
states he/she lives in) could be provided depending upon the feasibility of
application.
Must comment if you
like it.
