10 Reasons Why You Should Write Technical Specifications

Wonder why you’d need technical specifications and what the benefits would be? For a start let’s figure out the definition itself.

Technical specification or documentation is a document that every project or product manager must write before starting the actual software development. It has a set of requirements for the product in order for it to work as it was meant to be. This list of requirements has to be met before the development is complete.

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Making your requirements clear leaves no room for confusion or doubt.

We’ve got 10 key reasons as to why you shouldn’t skimp when it comes to specifications:

1. As a client, you can see your goal(s) more clearly.
2. The whole team that’s designated to a project can use the documentation as a reference to understand how features should work.
3. The Project Manager will be able to plan the work efficiently and create features that can be implemented right out of the documentation.
4. Quality Assurance engineers can test an application following the documentation.
5. Features are specified in the document and can’t get lost or overlooked.
6. A technical requirements document empowers the team to find common ground.
7. If a project is really big it gets developed over a few years. Therefore you may need to know how a particular feature implemented a few years ago works.
8. It helps to see the whole picture of how the project should work, thus helping the Quality Assurance engineer to ensure that features work as expected.
9. It helps both sides to find needed information such as shortcuts or a particular screen/functionality etc.
10. It saves money as it reduces the amount of time discussing the project’s details and the customer’s vision.

That’s why by making your requirements clear there’s no room for confusion or doubt which can only make for a more efficient and effective process.

In case, you don’t create a technical requirement document, real problems can emerge. To put this into perspective, let’s take a look at some cases that might take place when you don’t think things through:

• The Product Owner/Project Manager spends a lot more time discussing features with a customer.
• Quality Assurance engineers can’t assure the reliability of features as they are not described and the information about the whole project is scattered on a board or a cloud.
• The development team will always distract the Product Owner/Project Manager to consult how features or any other details should work.
• The development team can misunderstand how features must function and implement them by their judgment. That can lead to spending more money rather than if they had documentation providing the information.
• It’s harder to agree on the work that the tech agency has delivered because there are no clear requirements for how the application should work.
• A lot more bugs emerge due to misunderstandings of how features should run.

When making a tech specification you should keep a balance between making it too granular or vague. To help you with this task, we’ve created a software specification checklist that allows evaluating the readiness of your project for kickoff.

Creating technical specifications may not be easy for a customer, but it has explicit advantages for both the business and the software development company.

From our personal experience, a technical requirement document empowers the team to come to a mutual understanding of what is required, technically, to make your project or product a success.

If you wish to see how a professional technical specification looks like, let’s discuss your business idea and thought through each project detail!