Comments on non-functional requirements

["Scott Came" <scott@justiceintegration.com>]

I have the following comments on wd-LegalXML-Requirements-08 (April 4, 2005).

Same caveats as my previous
posting...if any of these comments are contrary to consensus reached on the subcommittee, please let me know and I
will either revise or withdraw them.  (I have tried to go through all the material available, but won't claim to have
absorbed everything!)

1640:  We should restate this as a requirement, not a rejection of a particular
implementation technique (in any case, "electronic messaging layer of a transmission" is not precise enough
or well-defined enough to be normative.)  What is the intent?

1656:  ...when they left the sender's
control

1656:  Is the rationale behind the recommendation documented in emails on one of the lists, or
minutes from a meeting?  In my view, this is something that the TC should decide.

1658ff:  I thought we had
decided to take this out, since asynchronicity of messages, where applicable, would be reflected in the use cases.  Am
I not remembering this correctly?

1667:  Including a message structure definition is outside the scope of
what I have traditionally seen non-functional requirements cover.  I would suggest creating a new section of the
document to hold message structure definitions.

1670 (thereabouts):  I don't think data definitions should
say where they are used.  Let the use cases indicate where messages are used.

1711:  What is meant by the
qualifier "theoretically"?

1732ff:  Aren't requirements 6.13 and 6.14 covered by 6.7 and 6.5?

1738ff:  More context is needed here before this can be part of a normative specification.

1769ff: 
The term "directory" could be construed as implying certain implementation techniques (as discussed in a
previous thread).  I would like to see this turned into a use case, in which MDEs are actors with the goal of
discovering information (location and otherwise) about other MDEs.  The use case could then be implemented by a UDDI
registry implementation, or something else.

1791:  What is meant by "following" GJXDM?

Thanks.
--Scott

Scott Came
Principal Consultant
Justice Integration Solutions, Inc.
Olympia, Washington
scott@justiceintegration.com
http://www.justiceintegration.com