Step 3: Non-Functional Requirements

📊 Progress: Step 3 of 6 ⏱️ Estimated Time: 1 hour

Executive Summary

This step focuses on the critical quality attributes and operational constraints that will ensure your AI agent solution is secure, compliant, and performant. By identifying and addressing non-functional requirements early, you’ll build a robust solution that meets IFS’s enterprise standards while delivering a superior user experience.

Home > AI Agent Challenge > Step 3 - Non-Functional Requirements

This section is part of the IFS AI Agent Challenge. Here, you’ll identify and document the business and technical requirements for the IFS Knowledge Assistant chatbot.

flowchart LR
    A[🚀 Start] --> B[📚 Step 1 Principles]
    B --> C[📋 Step 2 Functional Req]
    C --> D[🔒 Step 3 Non-Functional Req]
    D -->|Current| E[🏗️ Step 4 Solution Design]
    E --> F[🔄 Step 5 Integration]
    F --> G[📊 Step 6 Presentation]
    style D fill:#90EE90,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px

🎯 Objective

Capture all critical requirements—business, technical, security, compliance, and operational—that must be addressed in your solution.

📝 Activities

  • Review your findings from Step 2 (Functional Requirements).
  • As a team, discuss and document:
    1. 🏆 Business Requirements: What must the solution achieve for IFS to consider it a success?
    2. ⚙️ Technical Requirements: What are the key technical needs?
    3. 🛡️ Security & Compliance: What security, privacy, and compliance standards must be met?
    4. Operational Requirements: What are the support, monitoring, and management needs?

Guidance

Business Requirements

Consider aspects like:

  1. Cost Efficiency and ROI:
    • Implementation costs should be offset by productivity gains within 12 months
    • Reduced time spent searching for information (target: 30% reduction)
    • Integration with existing IT investments to minimize additional expenditure
  2. User Adoption and Experience:
    • Interface must be intuitive with minimal training needed
    • Response time must be under 3 seconds for standard queries
    • Accuracy rate of 90%+ for responses with high confidence scores
  3. Scalability and Growth:
    • Support for 5,000+ global employees
    • Ability to expand knowledge domains without architecture redesign
    • Multi-language support (English initial phase, expansion later)

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Technical Requirements

Document requirements such as:

  1. Performance:
    • Sub-3 second response time for 95% of queries
    • Support for 500+ concurrent users
    • 99.9% system availability during business hours
    • Efficient resource utilization with auto-scaling
  2. Scalability:
    • Index capacity for 100,000+ documents (500GB+ of content)
    • Support for document additions of 1,000+ per month
    • Ability to scale to handle 25,000+ queries per day
  3. Resilience:
    • Regional failover capabilities
    • No single point of failure in critical path
    • Graceful degradation under load

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Security & Compliance Requirements

Ensure you cover:

  1. Data Protection:
    • All data must remain within approved Azure regions
    • All data at rest and in transit must be encrypted
    • No PII should be stored in logs or analytics
    • Private network connectivity only (no public internet exposure)
  2. Authentication & Authorization:
    • Integration with Azure Entra ID
    • Role-based access control for different information categories
    • Comprehensive audit logs of all system access and usage
    • Secure service-to-service communication with managed identities
  3. Compliance:
    • Adherence to financial industry regulations
    • Ability to exclude certain sensitive document types from indexing
    • Content filtering to prevent inappropriate responses
    • Content attribution for all responses

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Operational Requirements

Define needs for:

  1. Monitoring & Management:
    • Comprehensive logging and monitoring solution
    • Real-time operational dashboards
    • Alerting for performance, security, or availability issues
    • Usage analytics and reporting capabilities
  2. Support & Maintenance:
    • Automated deployment pipeline for updates
    • Regular model retraining and content refreshing
    • Clear versioning and rollback capabilities
    • Knowledge management processes for content governance
  3. Governance:
    • Process for content approval and review
    • Continuous relevancy assessment of indexed materials
    • User feedback collection and analysis
    • Regular security and compliance reviews

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Success Criteria ✅

By the end of this step, you should have:

  • ✓ Documented security and compliance requirements specific to IFS’s industry and data types
  • ✓ Defined performance metrics including response times, throughput, and availability targets
  • ✓ Identified responsible AI controls needed to ensure ethical and trustworthy operation
  • ✓ Specified operational requirements for monitoring, management, and maintenance
  • ✓ Established disaster recovery parameters including RPO/RTO and business continuity needs

To successfully complete this step, ensure all non-functional requirements are clearly documented and prioritized for incorporation into your solution design.