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I have never written software specifications of any kind.
A prospect has inquired about my availability to help with his
company's specifications and user documentation.
My Internet research tells me that there are several flavors of
software specifications:
- Requirements
- Design (is this the same as "technical")
- Functional
It seems to me that these documents are company-specific and that
there are no widely recognized standards. I have seen examples of
the above documents and have reviewed some pertinent Web sites,
including:
What I am not clear on is whether I ought to say to this prospect
that I can do his documents, or whether I actually need to have
experience creating them.
In other words, it seems to me that I certainly *could* create
the documents with input from the developers, but that the
precise form of the documents would be something the company
would also have to tell me. Is that correct?
Some sites that I have visited today on the subject:
[This series of articles is about functional specifications, not
technical specifications. People get these mixed up. I don't know
if there's any standard terminology, but here's what I mean when
I use these terms.
1.A functional specification describes how a product will work
entirely from the user's perspective. It doesn't care how the
thing is implemented. It talks about features. It specifies
screens, menus, dialogs, and so on.
2. A technical specification describes the internal
implementation of the program. It talks about data structures,
relational database models, choice of programming languages and
tools, algorithms, etc.]
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