Software technical specification documentation

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. These documents are usually created before the project starts and can be altered as the product evolves.

Reports and metrics. Reports reflect how time and human resources were used during development. They can be generated on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Consult our article on agile delivery metrics to learn more about process documents such as velocity chats, sprint burndown charts, and release burndown charts. Working papers. The majority of process documents are specific to the particular moment or phase of the process.

As a result, these documents quickly become outdated and obsolete. But they still should be kept as part of development because they may become useful in implementing similar tasks or maintenance in the future. Also, process documentation helps to make the whole development more transparent and easier to manage.

The main goal of process documentation is to reduce the amount of system documentation. In order to achieve this, write the minimal documentation plan. List the key contacts, release dates, and your expectations with assumptions. Product roadmaps are used in Agile software development to document vision, strategy, and overall goals of the project. Roadmaps are used as process documents to keep the course of development in sync with initial goals.

Depending on the type of product roadmap, it can express high-level objectives, prioritization of tasks, the sprint timeline, or low-level details. A strategic roadmap is a high-level strategic document, that contains overall information on the project. Strategic roadmaps usually state a vision and long-term goals.

In the case of agile product development, a roadmap can be arranged in themes. Themes are multiple tasks that a team must complete and are somehow connected. Grouping the information around the themes makes a roadmap highly flexible and updatable, which is a great fit for sprint-based development. The best advice concerning strategic roadmapping is to include only important information. Otherwise, you risk turning your roadmap into a clumsy scheme, difficult to both understand and maintain.

Source: productplan. A technology roadmap or IT roadmap is a low-level document that describes technical requirements and the means of technology implementation. IT roadmaps are quite detailed. They contain the information on each deliverable, explaining the reason for such a decision.

Source: hutwork. A release plan is used to set strict time limits for releases. 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.

Functional requirements start describing the functionality used based on its importance for the application. You can start with design if you are planning to work on it first and then describe development. To see practical examples of functional requirements and their differences from non-functional requirements, take a look at our detailed guide. As you can tell, functional requirements is an extensive section of a system requirements specification. To describe all the essential features of the system, you will need pages of content.

To improve the readability of the document, some teams choose to break them down by categories. Usually, SRS design sections are described apart from backend and business logic. External interface requirements describe page elements that will be visible to the end client client-side of the application. System requirements describe the conditions necessary for the product to run.

Usually, they refer to hardware limitations and characteristics. SRS hardware requirements typically have minimal and maximal values, sometimes — a threshold for optimal product functionality. For many teams, this section of an SRS is the most challenging one. If functional requirements respond to the question of what to develop, non-functional define how. They set the criteria according to how the system has to function.

Performance thresholds, security, usability, intuitive — everything is described in this section. Creating non-functional requirements is difficult for the reason that they are the value. At the user level, use cases are the way you describe the behavior of the system, whereas at the code level, the way you describe system behavior is with unit tests.

Both techniques can be used to derive functional specifications. As you flesh out the behavior of the system with use cases, it should become clearer what the API should look like. You begin by creating an informal list of use cases. This document summarizes the process, as does this one. Once you have use cases, you can begin to build functional requirements from them. When the reserved vehicle is not available due to late returns, the customer is informed of the situation and told about the other vehicle types that are available.

The customer is offered an incentive to accept another vehicle type. If the customer is not satisfied, the reservation is cancelled without penalty charges. The customer either accepts another vehicle type or cancels the reservation.

And so on. From such a list of functional requirements, the elements that need to be present in the API should become readily apparent. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. It is a kind of functional specification that sets out page by page and element by element how a website or software should be coded.

The creators of Tech Specs are mostly trained software engineers or software managers who are aware of all the challenges of the project throughout the process. Such approaches are often observed in organizations where there are none or suboptimal web or software development processes designed.

On many occasions, these are organizations with little technical knowledge or training. Almost all organizations that do not have Tech Specs do also not have a separate development department, or lack of highly skilled professionals such as software engineers or software managers. Those who initiate web or software projects without technical specifications often have to struggle with a lot of other challenges, obstacles, and problems throughout the process.

In the following, I would like to explain the importance and advantages and thus the bundled power of technical specifications. The functions and elements presented in the design may prove to be too time-consuming and not at all feasible for the programmer. This can end in too many workarounds which the project team has to negotiate with the programmer in arduous ways.

Because without a software engineer as the middleman who has created the technical specifications, the programmer can now declare many of the desired features as void or cumbersome. Basically, a programmer without technical specifications has an upper hand in the project. The result of the web or software project without technical specifications will be a lot of neglected features and many workarounds.

The results often are not what you have imagined. Dissatisfaction is almost inevitable. Tech Specs outline the requirements for detail and clarity on what results can be expected. A web or software project with technical specifications on the other hand, can pass requirements directly to the programmer without any compromise. The Tech Specs speak to the coder, and the coder has also no need to indicate any difficulties, since these were already considered in the Tech Specs.

Unlike a project without Tech Specs, where the programmer can add additional cost and efforts during the coding phase. Since the programmer is basically not a project manager, such efforts can often occur arbitrarily and repeatedly. Not only is there no cost control, but such a process also leaves much room for unnecessary friction between the client, project management, and the programming team.

The time sacrificed between programmers, and the rest of the team is often underestimated. The math is easy: add up all the communication efforts from the point where you handed over the design to the programmer, and when it was completed.