The ignored step-child - the non-functional requirement

There have been some very interesting posts on non-functional requirements taking place recently.

About a week ago I posted, an item called Non-functional requirements & QA test strategies that was based on a comment received my leathej1 for my non-functional index as well a link to his post, The Fallacy of Non-Functional Requirements. The thrust of leathej1's idea was that non-functional requirements need to be collected in the same manner as functional requirements. This concept comes from his experience in quality assurance; where response times and performance targets are important to a system's acceptance. He made an excellent point that these sorts of items are usually given little consideration.
As a follow-up to leathej1's post, Scott Sehlhorst put up an article called, Non-Functional Requirements Equal Rights Amendments. Scott proposed a different way of looking at functional and non-functional requirements.

Read these articles, they're excellent.