Performance Requirements

Abstract

As performance is a vital quality factor for systems, an important challenge during system development is to deal with performance requirements. For a credit card system, for example, a developer might consider performance requirements to “achieve good response time for sales authorization” and “achieve good space usage for storing customer information.” Being global in their nature and impact, performance requirements are an important class of non-functional requirements (NFRs). To be effective, systems should attain NFRs as well as functional requirements (e.g., requiring a credit card system to authorize sales). However, it is generally difficult to deal with performance requirements and other NFRs, as they can conflict and interact with each other and with the many implementation alternatives which have varying features and tradeoffs.