The creation of documents depends on an organization’s policies, processes, expectations, and requirements of the stakeholders, and can even be built to house your non-functional requirements. 

Documents provide an easy way to create accountability for meeting the agreed upon requirements for a project. They afford a level of security for the stakeholders as documents can act as a checklist for agreed upon requirements, which can easily be cross-referenced to determine if stakeholders are getting what they paid for or if work was not completed. 

Another major benefit of proper documentation is that requirements often evolve throughout a project’s lifecycle. A requirement might become more clearly defined later in its life, or it might simply evolve in a manner that yields a different expectation of your product.  

Queue the addition of non-functional requirement documents to your process. 

As requirements evolve, so too will the expectations for your project. This means the success indicators of your project, a.k.a. non-functional requirements, will have to be reviewed and changed.  

Using our Smart Docs module of the Modern Requirements4DevOps suite, a user can easily construct a fully versionable requirements document directly from their Azure DevOps project. This means users can easily make, and track changes to requirements from a user-friendly document interface.  

New requirements can also be easily created in your project from within a document’s interface, or you can choose to insert existing requirements directly into your document. This means you can easily drag/drop your non-functional requirements directly into an easily exportable document without leaving Azure DevOps and without a need for copy/paste.  

Let’s extend the idea of importing your existing NFR’s that live in tables into Azure DevOps, and then cover how you can turn these NFR’s into documents using Modern Requirements.  

First you import into Azure DevOps your non-functional requirements from your table using the Microsoft Team tab extension for Excel. Then you simply query all non-functional requirements and drag/drop them into your document.  

It’s that simple.  

But let’s say you now want to add structure to a document so that non-functional requirements can only be added in specific areas of the document.  

We support that too! 

There is a template designer built directly within the Smart Docs module, that helps you dictate what work item types are allowed where in your documents. This means anyone building a document, NFR-based or otherwise, can easily adhere to the structure your template provides and create consistent documentation. 

The real issue with the documentation process in requirements management is lack of standardization. Certain document types are more common than others. However, the structure and contents of these documents vary from team to team. Additionally, teams always have the option of approaching documentation on an ad hoc basis. As mentioned earlier, a team could approach documenting non-functional requirements within their own specific document.

The lack of standardization seems like a benefit that provides flexibility within the documentation process. Unfortunately, there are some negatives to this flexibility. Lack of standardization can result in non-inclusion of work items. Regarding non-functional requirements this can be detrimental to a products success as they define a products user experience.

To put this into perspective, consider a situation where you have tried two similar products. There is a good chance that you found you liked one of the two products better even though both products performed their intended functions. This is very likely because the product you gravitated to has a better user experience. User experience is driven by non-functional requirements. Building non-functional requirements that are well-defined, measurable, and testable allows teams to quickly and definitively measure the success of any project.

By including non-functional requirements within documentation provides these requirements greater visibility to be reviewed and refined. This visibility can also influence the creation and evolution of functional requirements within your document.