Writing A Functional Specification - Laying The Foundations (
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With the advertising out of the way, let's take a look at the typical
components of a functional specification.
As stated earlier, the functional specification begins where the
requirements documents ends, and it performs the important function of
describing how the deliverable will meet the items listed in the
requirements spec. It must therefore begin with the identification of the
purpose of the application and the business objectives to be fulfilled by
it.
These objectives serve as the basis for derivation of the features required
in the application. It's important to spend time on making an exhaustive
list of all the features that are required, although there will always be a
few errant ones that you will miss out on in your first attempt.
Next, the target audience for the application should be described. Direct
interviews and user profiles are just two of the methods that may be used to
arrive at an idea of the audience base. Important factors to be captured
here include age, educational background, most common uses for the
application, current workflow for those tasks, and comfort level with
similar applications. It is also important, at this point, to get an idea of
the different user roles that the application must support, to assist in
designing security and privilege systems that will be implemented later.
With all this information at hand, you can make the first stab at
structuring all the raw data into a more organized framework. A good
approach to follow here is to use the data collected about the features
required and the workflow followed by the target users to divide the
application into modules, which in turn encompass the relevant features.
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