My Agile 2010 Presentation on Nonfunctional Requirements

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Dean Leffingwell in Agile Requirements

I promised to post the slides from my second Agile 2010 presentation coauthored with Ryan Shriver. Thanks to Ryan for putting the “beef” into this one. Here’s the abstract:

Agile teams typically apply user stories to capture functional requirements – the “what” the system will do. However, agile literature and practice provides little or no guidance on establishing “how well”, in aggregate, the system performs those functions. This tutorial introduces simple, proven practices for defining and testing nonfunctional requirements (aka system qualities) including integration into your agile processes. You will learn how to define and quantify the right system qualities so everyone understands the system’s expected performance.

And here’s the slides:


At the end of the slides there’s a simple exercise you can use to identify, quantify and set constraints and targets for the specific system qualities for your system.