A product spec is used as an outline of the requirements for the product team. It is usually written by the product manager and provides all the information they need to build the product with specific features and functionalities and offers a technical description, performance specification, and the technical standards to meet along with other details.
This outline is used to communicate information about users, business directives, and any other criteria that will assist your team in designing and building a product. Every product specification is based on technical requirements, engineering specifications, and other details that are specific to the particular product.
Generally, though, the following should be included in your product specification sheet:. This is where you need technical specs and drawings. The design can be amended as you move through product development.
There are lots of different ways you can include design information in your product specification sheet. What problem or challenge will this product help users solve?
Make sure that the needs and problems that the product will address are noted in the product summary. What do customers want in a new product? He started from managing small teams, and now he assembles an expert team of more than 40 software developers. His expertise and knowledge of the latest technical innovations have brought Jelvix to the ranks of the most distinguished custom software development companies.
With the variety of available technology and hardware, developers and product owners of a project can go off track easily. At some point, technical objectives might cloud the business goals, leaving the team and potential customers with a poorly thought-out service. This is where a software requirement specification comes in to save the day. In SRS, developers, product owners, and stakeholders specify tangible criteria for the expected product.
The purpose of the SRS report is to clarify all potentially vague aspects of software development. However, regardless of which development methodologies you are using, the software specs should never be omitted from your project.
If you neglect to outline the crucial aspects of the project, too many things can go wrong. Software Requirements Specification is the type of documentation that you create once but use for years. A software specification requirements document helps all parties involved in software development to understand their priorities. Developers get familiar with the business goals of a product owner, whereas stakeholders familiarize themselves with the technology, used by the software engineering team.
SRS brings financial and tech goals together, keeping everyone in the loop. Read more about the most common software development strategies and take a look at benefits and drawbacks. So, what is an SRS document? You can go into detail and describe what stakeholders and teams will work with SRS and participate in its creation. Usually, these are product owners, investors, business analysts, developers, sometimes testers, and operation teams.
Describe in which situations your team will use the SRS. Example: SwitchbackHealth one of our projects is a solution for mobile physical therapy. The service connects patients and therapists by allowing patients to send videos of their exercise routine.
Doctors can administer new treatments and follow up on their progress. As a result, physical therapy is available to patients regardless of their access to the hospital. Throughout your document, the team refers to specific terms all the time. Clearing the meaning of these words will eliminate possible misunderstandings, help with the onboarding of new developers, and clear out conflicting situations.
Definitions describe the functionality, used technology, target personas, business entities users, clients, middlemen , and stakeholders. You can choose to refer to a particular user group with an acronym to write an SRS faster. As long as you include it in the table of definitions, the document will be readable.
This description focuses only on key features and software architecture without going into detail about add-ons and integrations. This section is arbitrary, so some teams choose not to include it in their SRS engineering documentation. It will help you later on during functionality brainstorming and monitoring.
Why are assumptions important? For a night-driving assistant, this assumption helps you to figure out that designers have to develop an interface suited for vision in the dark. This section describes specific product functionality and its execution criteria. Functional requirements are presented in a list of functions that will be executed in a system.
A usability testing report is a short-form feedback document created to communicate the results of usability testing. The report should be as short as possible, with visual examples prevailing over text. Software architecture design documents, sometimes also called technical specifications, include the main architectural decisions made by the solution architect.
Unlike the product requirement document mentioned above that describes what needs to be built, the architecture design documentation is about how to build it. It has to describe in what way each product component will contribute to and meet the requirements, including solutions, strategies, and methods to achieve that.
So, the software design document gives an overview of the product architecture, determines the full scope of work, and sets the milestones, thus, looping in all the team members involved and providing the overall guidance.
An effective design and architecture document comprises the following information sections:. Overview and background. Briefly describe the main goals of the project, what problems you are trying to solve, and the results you want to achieve. Underline the guiding architecture and design principles with which you will engineer the product.
User Story description. Connect user stories with associated business processes and related scenarios. You should try to avoid technical details in this section. Solution details. Describe the contemplated solution by listing planned services, modules, components, and their importance.
Diagrammatic representation of the solution. Source: docs. That will help organize the work process and provide a clear metric to monitor progress. A source code document is a technical section that explains how the code works. The main users of the source code documents are software engineers. Try to keep the document simple by making short sections for each element and supporting them with brief descriptions.
There are different types of user acceptance testing in agile. We have outlined the most common:. A quality management plan is an analog of a requirement document dedicated to testing. This document sets the required standard for product quality and describes the methods to achieve this level. The plan helps to schedule QA tasks and manage testing activity for product managers, but, it is mainly used for large-scale projects. A test strategy is a document that describes the software testing approach to achieve testing objectives.
This document includes information about team structure and resource needs along with what should be prioritized during testing. A test strategy is usually static as the strategy is defined for the entire development scope.
A test plan usually consists of one or two pages and describes what should be tested at a given moment. This document should contain:. A test case specifications document is a set of detailed actions to verify each feature or functionality of a product.
Usually, a QA team writes a separate specifications document for each product unit. Test case specifications are based on the approach outlined in the test plan. A good practice is to simplify specifications description and avoid test case repetitions. Test checklist is a list of tests that should be run at a particular time. It represents what tests are completed and how many have failed.
All points in the test checklists should be defined correctly. Try to group test points in the checklists. This approach will help you keep track of them during your work and not lose any. If it helps testers to check the app correctly, you can add comments to your points on the list. This document should describe known problems with the system and their solutions.
It also should represent the dependencies between different parts of the system. Their documentation informs developers how to effectively use and connect to the required APIs. API documentation is a deliverable produced by technical writers as tutorials and guides. This type of documentation should also contain the list of all available APIs with specs for each one.
As the name suggests, user documentation is created for product users. However, their categories may also differ.
So, you should structure user documentation according to the different user tasks and different levels of their experience. Generally, user documentation is aimed at two large categories:. The documentation created for end-users should explain in the simplest way possible how the software can help solve their problems. Such user instructions can be provided in the printed form, online, or offline on a device.
Here are the main types of the user documents:. The complete manual includes exhaustive information and instructions on how to install and operate the product. It lists the hardware and software requirements, detailed description of the features and full guidelines on how to get the most out of them, example inputs and outputs, possible tips and tricks, etc.
The troubleshooting guide gives end-users information on how to find and resolve possible issues that might arise when using the product. For a detailed overview, check our article dedicated to user documentation. Some parts of user documentation, such as tutorials and onboarding, in many large customer-based products are replaced with onboarding training. Nevertheless, there are still complex systems remaining that require documented user guides.
User documentation requires technical writers to be more imaginative. Online end-user documentation may include the following sections:. Written in plain language with visual materials and step-by-step instructions included, user guides can become a powerful marketing tool and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Besides, to provide the best service for end-users, you should collect your customer feedback continuously.
The wiki system is one of the more useful practices. It helps to maintain the existing documentation. You can create your wiki pages using a wiki markup language and HTML code. Usually, administration docs cover installation and updates that help a system administrator with product maintenance.
Here are standard system administrators documents:. Process documentation covers all activities surrounding product development. The value of keeping process documentation is to make development more organized and well-planned. This branch of documentation requires some planning and paperwork both before the project starts and during the development. Here are common types of process documentation:. Plans, estimates, and schedules. Only then would it become clear just how much time was spent on meetings, emails, and additional explanations.
Just one question from the programmer can keep the project manager busy for several hours and even lead to more internal meetings. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that many companies are not aware of the communication costs during a web or software project. Tech Specs are incredible communication tools. Well created Tech Specs lead hardly to any questions from the programming team.
With Tech Specs, communication is reduced, which unburdens the entire team. The creation of Tech Specs also takes much less time than the time required for communication, when there are no Tech Specs. Tech Specs are true miracles in cost savings when it comes to communication control in web or software development. Worse, the Client had different expectations as in additional features.
Since programming is the costliest phase of the project, such rework can cost a fortune. In the end, a tiresome discussion with the client is needed to explain why certain functions and features had to be different or even left out.
This usually causes an internal problem as well. Should the client be charged for the reprogramming, or is this something the web or software agency should provide as it was stated in the design? All these predicaments can be avoided when technical specifications are presented to the client beforehand.
As well as wireframes and designs, technical specifications should be approved by the client especially for large scaled projects.
Also, providing such transparency ultimately strengthens the relationship with the client even more. Fact is, programmers are and will remain a species of their own, in a world that is often incomprehensible to others. To address programmers, one must speak in their language and culture. If the communication and instructions are provided by non-experts, it leads to miscommunication, less recognition by the developer, and as a consequence, less competent work can be expected.
Tech Specs act as middlemen. They speak to the programmer and provide instructions that the programmer understands and acknowledges. Thus, well-formulated Tech Specs make programmers better recognize the requirements set out.
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