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Bob,
Sandy made a legitimate suggestion about finding books on development
methodologies. But I'd like to offer another perspective. Having just
come off the experience of developing a functional specification
template/process for our company, I discovered the following,
miraculous, never-before-discovered-in-the-history-of-writing, approach:
Start with what they're doing now, figure out what information they need
that they don't have, create a document that helps them provide that
information.
Shocking, isn't it?
You say your developers are already writing technical specifications.
Presumably they're putting in the information they need. Look at
documents produced by different developers to identify all the different
sections, identify any problem areas, figure out solutions, develop a
template, run it by the developers, bask in their huge appreciation. Use
the tools that they use (Word? Frame?) to make it easier to generate
consistent documents.
I went through this, except that we had nothing to start with. So we
kind of speculated for a while, created a template and tried it out,
discovered that we needed a couple things, deleted one big section it
turned out we wouldn't use, and now we have a really good standard
functional spec. The software methodology books weren't much help in my
particular case.
If you looked through the archives, you discovered that a functional
specification in one company is a technical spec in another is
requirements in a third. Your best resource is your developers and what
they've already done.
HTH,
Lisa Wright
Product Manager
PeakEffects
-----Original Message-----
>From bobzumar -at- hotmail -dot- com
I have searched the archives for some discussion on this but did not
find
anything.
I know there is always concern over asking for documents, but I was
hoping
someone could give me some direction on writing technical
specifications. I
am a lone tech writer at my company and I write everything but these
documents. Each time a developer writes a technical spec they "re-create
the wheel." An example would be great, but I understand that is a lot to
ask. Perhaps there is a site on the web to which I could be referred
that
might have a good example.
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