Project quality requirements

Project quality requirements are the conditions or capabilities that the project's deliverables and processes must satisfy to be accepted by the customer and meet standards. They are identified during Plan Quality Management and recorded in the requirements documentation and the quality management plan.

Categories of quality requirements

1. Functional requirements: what the product must do (e.g. generate reports, process payments).
2. Performance requirements: speed, throughput, response time (page loads in under 3 seconds), capacity (10,000 concurrent users).
3. Reliability and availability: mean time between failures, 99.9% uptime.
4. Usability: ease of learning and use, accessibility, user interface standards.
5. Security: authentication, encryption, audit logs, data protection.
6. Maintainability and portability: ease of changes, support, compatibility on different platforms.
7. Compliance requirements: laws, regulation (e.g. Nepal Rastra Bank guidelines, Electronic Transactions Act), standards (ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 25010, IEEE).
8. Process quality requirements: coding standards, review procedures, documentation, testing coverage.
9. Acceptance criteria: conditions that must be met for the customer to accept.
10. Environmental/operational: hardware, network, installation conditions.

Stakeholder needs -> Quality requirements
   -> Metrics + Acceptance criteria -> QM plan

Characteristics of good requirements

Clear, measurable, testable, complete, consistent, traceable (via traceability matrix) and agreed with stakeholders.

Example: A mobile banking project requires two-factor authentication (security), transaction completion in under 5 seconds (performance), and compatibility with Android and iOS (portability).