Applying an Improving Strategy that embeds Functional and Non-Functional Requirements Concepts

Abstract

Organizations should set and reach business goals for varied purposes using the suitable strategies. Basically, a strategy specifies the activities, methods and another related resources that should be considered in order to achieve a given goal purpose. Goal purposes and their associated strategies can aim at evaluating, testing, developing, or maintaining some entity. Some concrete evaluation purposes such as to understand or monitor can be achieved by strategies embracing non-functional requirements definition, measurement, evaluation and analysis activities. Other specific evaluation purposes such as to improve or control also imply changing the target entity; therefore, strategies should embrace functional requirements definition activities as well. Moreover, specific development and maintenance purposes always involve functional requirements. In this work, we relate business and information need goals with functional and non-functional requirements concepts, which are paramount for well-defined strategies. Therefore, we specify vocabularies for them, and illustrate the applicability of an improving strategy –which embeds these concepts-in the context of a running example. Having well-structured vocabularies serving as common ground for diverse strategies may promote a more effective operationalization of projects dealing with evaluation, testing, development and maintenance goal purposes.