Square pegs, round holes – why non-funcs are really not stories - December 17th, 2010, by Fergal

I’ve been blogging lately about a couple of topics pertaining to ‘agile’ methods. Along those lines, I wanted to consider one suggested practice that I think is worth reflecting on, that is; the treatment of NFRs (non-functional requirements) as stories.

Let’s draw back for a moment. Regardless of process approach, be it traditional or agile, poor treatment of NFRs is one of the highest risk areas in IT delivery. For anyone who has been involved in even a half-way serious type of project, lack of adequate NFR consideration will royally bite you in the bum. In my experience, it is probably the single biggest cause of lost sleep, likely I suspect accounting for the highest rate of ulcers for project & program managers. This applies to stakeholders at all levels, from project managers to executives. Executives as they realise in horror that the $70 million integration project due to go into production in 2 months time is behind and is not scaling according to plan and the business is looking for a release date or that the production system is down periodically for long spells due to scaling issues.
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