What you know about Functional Specification Document?

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Functional Specification Document(FSD), also called as Functional Requirement Specification(FRS) is useful in document functional requirements in a software system. This document represents the useful necessity(functional requirements) and contains an explained view of each page on the customer facing front and each condition of the page. FSD provide a service as the sours of truth about how the site acts and how the dealer can affect that behavior.

Why FSD ?

Functional specification document ensure that developers or testers are working on the correct functionalities which they are being assign from the beginning to end of the system.

Who use it?

Entire team will go through the FSD and developers and testers use this to get an idea about what are the features they need to build and what are the function testers should test.

How BA create FSD?

Business Analyst is fully responsible for creating FSD and share it with the client to get the approval and after that this document becomes a standard document.

Steps to create :

1. Studying the artifacts (SOW, BRD, project charter) to identify the functionalities, capabilities and features of software system and make a list of them.
2. Identify the main business stakeholders.
3. Discuss with stakeholders about each every functionalities and features in depth.
4. Record them with considering organization complains.
5. Finally share it with client to get the approval.

What all the FSD contain ?

Format or the contain of the FSD could be change based on the organization need and also project type. Mainly it contains with,

1. Product context — Description about the systems (functions, goals, deliverables, task… etc.)
2. Data requirements — What type of data is used / format of data.
3. User Interface requirements — How should external user interact with system?
4. Security requirements — What are the access permission for different user roles.
5. Legal/complains requirements — What are the standards and protocols , regulations that system must to comply with.
6. Non-functional requirements — like performance (how fast system is load)
7. Assumptions — List the things need to be true for the system being developed.
8. Constraint — Restriction you can have when developing the system.

Accurately defining and documenting the functional requirements is very critical for the success of any project. If not project can lead to failures.

Hope this article will help you to improve your knowledge about functional specification documents.

See you again, Bye!