More than XP. More than one day.

Agile methodologies focus strongly on functional requirements. The methods we use (the planning game, an on-site customer etc) give clear guidance on how to derive them, define them and track them on our agile projects. Non-functional requirements are the ‘ilities’ of the system. Things like ‘compatibility’, ‘availability and response times’, ‘scalability’, ‘reliability’. These are a bit more slippery and are causing us to scratch our heads in lots of ways.

This Goldfish Bowl is proposed as an exploration of non-functional design in Agile. In particular, it provides a space for practitioners to discuss what has worked, or equally what hasn’t. Of course, new, untried ideas will also be very much welcomed. The hope is that in exploring this as a group we can come up with a set of options/guidelines for incorporating non-functional requirements into agile projects and understand a bit more about the pros and cons of each of them.

We aim to produce a poster from the session output describing these options/guidelines.

Example issues include:

Who’s the customer for non-functionals? How do/can they understand the implications of non-functional requirements? How are they expressed? How are they prioritised against functional requirements? How do we gather them?

The 60 minute session will include:

5 minutes scene setting - What are non-functionals? Why this session? 15 minutes discussion on: What is tricky about non-functionals (or are they easy?) 25 minutes on: What has or hasn’t worked as an approach to gathering and managing non-functionals (and what else might work)? 10 minutes ‘auditing’ the poster we have created and adding anything else to it. 5 minutes wrapping up.