Full Stack Testing

Chapter 10. Cross-Functional Requirements Testing

When we understand CFRs is when we truly understand quality!

Businesses often think of hundreds of functional requirements, looking to add value for customers and gain revenue. These functional requirements constitute the core business services offered to the customers—for instance, the feature to book a ride with a ride-hailing app or make a payment with an internet banking facility. However, just implementing these functional requirements is not enough to guarantee success. Imagine you want to book a ride, and you have to wait five minutes to see the list of available options. You could probably hail a taxi in that time, so why bother to use the app? Or maybe the app does its job functionally well, but it takes several steps to book a ride. The complexity would be frustrating, and you would likely look for a more user-friendly alternative sooner or later. Likewise, if you found out the app was exposing your personal details, you would certainly get rid of it. These are just a few examples of why businesses and software teams need to focus on cross-functional requirements (CFRs). They make the application complete and, most importantly, imbue high quality.

CFRs are features of the application that have to be built into every functional feature. For example, a couple of CFRs for the ride-hailing app could be that the app should respond to users within x seconds, users should be able to perform any action within n steps, and the ...