Performance: How Good?

This chapter deals with the performance of quality, resource savings, and workload capacity. Performance describes system benefits, and performance attributes state the actual and/or potential benefits and effects experienced by stakeholders in their environments. Performance attributes are the output attributes, which state the effectiveness of a system. By contrast, the input attributes are the resources of developing and/or maintaining a system that exhibits those performance attributes. Many performance requirements, such as quality requirement and usability, can be expressed using subrequirements such as learning time taken, error rates, and minimum skills at entry level. There are many possible interpretations, and they all have some use or validity. Such decomposable ideas are called “complex requirements.” The performance to cost ratio for a system is a measure of its efficiency. This chapter summarizes that performance requirements are the key statements of expected and necessary critical stakeholder benefits for a project. Performance requirements are the main reasons why projects are funded. So it is critical that they are done well and managed well.