People often confuse the purpose and role of functional specifications and design documents. Design and function should never meet in a document. Design and function must be documented during the ...

In today's enterprise landscape, software development often resembles a game of telephone. Business users articulate needs, and—after those needs go through layers of marketing, product and ...

It's often been said that form follows function. I prefer to think that function drives form. Unfortunately, just the opposite is true for modern CAD tools -- function is a slave to form (or geometry) ...

If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a thousand times: Documentation is the least favorite part of engineering. But it also may be one of the most important and is growing to be more so. This was made ...

The blueprint for the design of a system. With regard to a business information system, the specification provides the documentation for the database structure, the human and machine procedures, and ...

During the design process, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is typically used to assess how equipment and machinery might fail. Recent functional safety design legislation in the EU has ...

I like to design the UI while writing the functional spec, this gives me a feel for what the user is going to have to do to complete a given task, and allows me to streamline the operation of the ...