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What are technical specifications? Are they the same as design documents. If not, what is the difference and some examples?

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2 Answers 2

Technical specifications, at least in the form of a technical design, are part of the design documents, along with, for example, requirements lists, functional designs, user stories, graphics design mockups, usability studies, UML diagrams, business process diagrams, data model specifications, etc.

Technical specifications of the type that you write after the fact, to document the finished product, are not generally part of the design documents, but they can be included in the set of design documents of a later version (for reference) or another product that relies on them.

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Thank you. Also basically I need functional specification to know what to do and then design documents to know how to do, is that correct? Just a little question, what is the functional design you referred to (hope it wont add confusion to my understanding of functional spec) –  user970696 Dec 15 '12 at 15:14
A functional design defines the product's intended functionality, from a user's point of view, without going into implementation details. There are plenty of questions with excellent answers here that give exhaustive explanation about what a functional design is and is not. –  tdammers Dec 15 '12 at 23:13
So when should we actually write technical specification.? Before development? Along with development? or After ..? –  AnimalsAreNotOursToEat Aug 11 at 4:02

A software design document can be at the level of a system or component, and generally describes the following aspects:

  • relevant goals or requirements (functional and non-functional)
  • static structure (e.g. components, interfaces, dependencies)
  • dynamic behavior (how components interacts)
  • data models or external interfaces (external to the system/component described in the document)
  • deployment considerations (e.g. runtime requirements, third party components)

Note that all of these descriptions are at an abstract level. The purpose is to give the reader a broad general understanding of the system or component. There may be many levels of design documents, e.g. at the system level, component-level etc.

A technical specification, in contrast, describes the minute detail of either all or specific parts of a design, e.g.:

  • the signature of an interface, including all data types/structures required (input data types, output data types, exceptions)
  • detailed class models including all methods, attributes, dependencies and associations
  • the specific algorithms that a component employs and how they work
  • physical data models including attributes and types of each entity/data type
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@ShashwatTripathi generally, specifications are written before development, so that someone else (or you at a later time) can implement the components. Writing the specification after the development has been done, makes it kind of pointless (unless you use it as the technical documentation on what has been implemented). –  miraculixx Aug 13 at 11:39
+1 thanks a lot :-) –  AnimalsAreNotOursToEat Aug 13 at 12:39

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