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Re: Tech Spec vs Functional Spec was RE: What are you working on?

Subject: Re: Tech Spec vs Functional Spec was RE: What are you working on?
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: Richard Lewis <tech44writer -at- yahoo -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:15:45 -0500

Richard Lewis wrote:

Hi all:
Thanks for the informative responses. Basic concensous: Functional Specs state what the system will do and Techical Specs states how the system will do it. That makes sense; I now kind of wonder why I asked the question in the first place. I guess what threw me is that it has been my experience that Technical Specs are most often created without Functional Specs first being created. Which, when you think about it, is like the analysts saying "We don't know what we are going to do, but we are going to use solutions x,y and z to do it".

Thanks,


I think that the more standard nomenclature is design spec. The functional spec says what the system is supposed to do; the design spec says how it will do that. "Technical spec," in my experience as in yours, has usually referred to a neither-fish-nor-fowl document that is basically a brain dump of the person who first came up with the idea (often a marketing person, not an engineer). Some people may use the term to mean something more specific--a synonym for design spec, for example--but my BS detectors start quivering when I hear someone talking about a "technical spec."

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RE: Tech Spec vs Functional Spec was RE: What are you working on?: From: Richard Lewis

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