Topic: web metrics/standards

For me I have never been a fan of the term "non-functional requirements." To me they are

quality requirements and thus do answer to functionality, particularly when you consider

that a better way to discuss functionality is in terms of behavior. (That is why functional

testing is, to me, better called behavioral testing.)

That said, I think the user community as a whole does force a certain set of constraints

regarding what will be tolerated. On the other hand, most organizations do not know those

figures and it is up to QA to make sure those are known in the form of valid metrics or

SLAs. Also some requirements of standards cannot come from the user community because they

do not have the implicit knowledge to state those requirements. (That is why so many

products are rejected by customers saying, "Yes, this is what I asked for but not what I

wanted.")

In general, timings are based on the work of neuropsychology which tells us the perceptual

limits of how people work with things such as Web applications. The best statement of this

based on much empirical evidence is the 0.1/1/10 rule. However, as we all discussed in

another post, those "rules" have to be taken in context of the page itself and what is

going on contextually relative to the user tasks.

Also some W3C standards, such as the WAI Guidelines, would most likely not come from your

users but rather from sound development practices; something that the users are abstracted

away from. Users do not care how you built it, they care if it works. So a customer may

say, "Make sure people with disabilities can use this Web site" but they would not be able

to specify how to go about doing that.

Granted, that last example speaks more to functional requirements but, by that logic, so

does all timing information. Also remember that even by the definition of "non-functional

requirements" that many people use, one aspect of that is "cost requirements" and that is

generally not going to come from your user community. That is going to be internal to the

organization.