FURPS Non-Functional Requirements

Discuss about on the on the Project of Telehealth.

Telehealth project was introduced for the improvement of access to the healthcare in most of the hospitals and healthcare services, present in the rural areas (Weinstein et al., 2014). The professionals of healthcare are eventually separated by longer distance and this makes it extremely tough for any individual to reach out to health experts or hospitals. It is very common in rural areas that due to the problem in communication with the health experts, the patients have intense problems in completing their treatments (Phillips et al., 2016). The project Telehealth was introduced for this particular purpose so that the treatment can be done without visiting to the hospitals. The idea was to treat the patients with the help of technology.

This report provides a detailed description on the project of Telehealth. This report will help in understanding the several non-functional requirements of the project, which include functionality, usability, reliability, performances and security. The cloud based solution, including the strengths and weaknesses is also given here. Moreover, the system development life cycle approach is described with proper details. Relevant recommendation are also given in the report.

Non-Functional Requirements of the System

The identification of any critical quality of a system is done by the non-functional requirements (Chung et al., 2012). FURPS are the non-functional requirements of Telehealth project. Functionalities, usability, reliability, performances and also security are explained below.

Functionality

The most significant requirement for this Telehealth project is the functionality requirement. This project is responsible for the better treatment of patients, who have a problem in communication with hospitals due to their place of residence (Chung et al., 2012). Telehealth project requires a distinct function for the regular updates and easy access to data from all devices s per the user requirements. The significant requirement for the Telehealth project is adaptability.

 Usability

This is the second major requirement for the Telehealth project of rural areas. The major advantage of this project is that it can be easily utilized with perfect effectiveness and efficiency (Kulkarni et al., 2012). Usability can be defined as the simplicity of learn ability and utilization of any human made project or object. This project does not consider the distance between the patient and the health experts or hospitals.

Reliability

The third major non-functional requirement of the Telehealth project is the reliability. This particular project is extremely reliable as real health experts or professionals are hired for the treatment of the patients (Chen & Zhao, 2012). The difference between normal hospitals and Telehealth is only that the patients do not have to visit to the hospitals for their treatments and they can be treated by audio or video conferences. This can bring major changes in the adaption of technology in rural areas and thus improving the entire system of treatments.

Cloud-Based Solution

Performances

Performance is the fourth non-functional requirement for the Telehealth project. This project has the ability to provide better performance in the medical field than the traditional ways of treatment. The performance of any project is the most important requirement. As proper and relevant health experts will do the treatment, it is needless to mention that the performance of the project will be as good as the traditional treatment system.

Security

Security is the final non-functional requirement for the Telehealth project. Security is extremely important for this particular project, as it will be dealing with the life of several patients (Jain & Nandakumar, 2012). The unauthorized access to this project can be very dangerous for the treatment of the patients. Biometric system would be the best alternative for the security of Telehealth project, which would eventually prevent every unauthorized access.  

Telehealth project is initiated by a group of health experts for the proper treatment of patients, who reside in rural areas. This perfect combination of information and communication technology and medical field would be extremely useful for these patients (Phillips et al., 2016). It has been observed that the combination of medical field and information and communication technology can give the best solutions to all the problems of rural areas. This project will become if they will opt for a cloud based solution. Eventually, there are four distinct types of clouds, namely, public, private, community and hybrid. The public cloud is an open cloud, with no limitations and everybody can access data (AlZain et al., 2012). Private cloud is different from public cloud. The data access is possible only within a specific group of clients. Community cloud is the third type and the main feature of this cloud is that a specific group of clients, with similar or same requirements can access the data. Hybrid cloud is the mixture of any two clouds.

The best solution for the Telehealth project will be the hybrid cloud. As this is the mixture of any two clouds, it comprises of all the features of those two clouds (Li et al., 2015). This particular characteristic is extremely beneficial for any project and can bring success to the project. Hence, hybrid cloud is the best solution for Telehealth project.

Every type of cloud has significant features. Similarly, the types of clouds have various strengths and weaknesses (Chen & Zhao, 2012). The recommended cloud for Telehealth is the hybrid cloud. The important strengths of any hybrid cloud are given below:

1. i) Cost Effectiveness: The most significant advantage of a hybrid cloud is the cost effectiveness. A typical hybrid cloud is the proper mixture of two other clouds and thus comprises of all the features of those two clouds (Galibus & Vissia, 2015). However, in spite of having features of two different clouds, hybrid cloud is extremely cost effective and does not incur huge cost.
2. ii) Security: Security is again another important strength of hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is absolutely secured for any kind of data transfer online (Kulkarni et al., 2012). There is almost zero chance of data loss and unauthorized data access in hybrid cloud.

System Development Life Cycle Approach

The main weaknesses or demerits of a hybrid cloud are given below:

Implementation Cost: Hybrid cloud incurs extremely high cost in implementation and thus small organizations do not have the capability to afford it (Li et al., 2015).Data

Movement: The second disadvantage of hybrid cloud is the data movement. The continuous movement of data from the public or private clouds to the hybrid cloud makes the data easily available for any hacker (Li et al., 2013)

System development life cycle or SDLC approach subdivides the life cycle of any system into various stages (Balaji & Murugaiyan, 2012). The main advantage of SDLC approach in any project is that it reduces the complexities of development of the system. Predictive and adaptive are two types of approaches of SDLC.

This approach refers to the complete life cycle before starting any project. The predictive approach is applicable only when the schedules of Telehealth project are absolutely clear (Mahalakshmi & Sundararajan, 2013). The several pros or cons of this predictive approach are given below:

Pros:

Project planning is perfect.

Project scope and project schedule are absolutely clear to each and every member.

Project requirements are properly understood by all members.

Project progress is tracked during the life of the project.

Cons:

Changing of the project plan is impossible.

Feedback of the clients cannot be considered.

Adaptive Approach

This adaptive approach is the exact opposite of predictive approach. Project planning is not completed before project initiation. Relevant project deliverables are given in all stages of the project (Mahalakshmi & Sundararajan, 2013). The pros or cons of the adaptive approach are given below:

Pros:

Project plan can be modified in all stages.

Client feedbacks can be considered.

Cons:

Incurs huge cost.

Project scope and project schedule are unclear (Balaji & Murugaiyan, 2012).

Hence, the predictive approach would be the best SDLC approach for the Telehealth project.

Conclusion

Therefore, conclusion can be drawn that, Telehealth is a project that was initiated for the successful improvement of access to all the healthcares in the healthcare services and hospitals, present in the rural areas. The experts of healthcare or the doctors, nurses are unconnected by the longer distance and this specifically becomes difficult for any person to communicate with the hospitals or health experts. For the communication problem with the hospitals or health experts, it is extremely common in the rural areas that the patients have major problems in completion of their treatments. The project Telehealth was initiated for this specific reason so that the treatment of the patients could be easily done even when the patients cannot visit the hospitals. The proposal was simple that they can treat the patients by technology. The above report has described about the FURPS requirements or functionalities, usability, reliabilities, performance and security of the project. The solution that is based on cloud is also given here. The cloud environment has various weaknesses and strengths within it. These weaknesses and strengths can help to select a proper solution for the project. Furthermore, the SDLC approach is described with the pros and cons of the adaptive and predictive approaches

References

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Balaji, S., & Murugaiyan, M. S. (2012). Waterfall vs. V-Model vs. Agile: A comparative study on SDLC. International Journal of Information Technology and Business Management, 2(1), 26-30.

Chen, D., & Zhao, H. (2012, March). Data security and privacy protection issues in cloud computing. In Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (ICCSEE), 2012 International Conference on (Vol. 1, pp. 647-651). IEEE.

Chung, L., Nixon, B. A., Yu, E., & Mylopoulos, J. (2012). Non-functional requirements in software engineering (Vol. 5). Springer Science & Business Media.

Galibus, T., & Vissia, H. E. R. M. (2015). Cloud storage security. Proc NSCE, 2014, 123-127.

Jain, A. K., & Nandakumar, K. (2012). Biometric Authentication: System Security and User Privacy. IEEE Computer, 45(11), 87-92.

Kulkarni, G., Gambhir, J., Patil, T., & Dongare, A. (2012, June). A security aspects in cloud computing. In Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS), 2012 IEEE 3rd International Conference on (pp. 547-550). IEEE.

Li, J., Li, Y. K., Chen, X., Lee, P. P., & Lou, W. (2015). A hybrid cloud approach for secure authorized deduplication. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 26(5), 1206-1216.

Li, Q., Wang, Z. Y., Li, W. H., Li, J., Wang, C., & Du, R. Y. (2013). Applications integration in a hybrid cloud computing environment: Modelling and platform. Enterprise Information Systems, 7(3), 237-271.

Mahalakshmi, M., & Sundararajan, M. (2013). Traditional SDLC Vs Scrum Methodology–A Comparative Study. International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering, 3(6), 192-196.

Phillips, V. L., Vesmarovich, S., Hauber, R., Wiggers, E., & Egner, A. (2016). Telehealth: reaching out to newly injured spinal cord patients. Public health reports.

Weinstein, R. S., Lopez, A. M., Joseph, B. A., Erps, K. A., Holcomb, M., Barker, G. P., & Krupinski, E. A. (2014). Telemedicine, telehealth, and mobile health applications that work: opportunities and barriers. The American journal of medicine, 127(3), 183-18