Functional Design Specifications – Key for high quality deliverables

A couple of weeks back, after a few workshops that we conducted with our client base, two of my techno-functional leads and I were having a working-coffee session with our boss, in a coffee shop in Ankeny… the objective was to talk through the complete list of end-user inputs that we collected as part of the workshops and understand their impact and complexity of implementing those changes.  This was a prelude to our work prioritization against these feedbacks.

We had meticulously noted down all the points that trickled in during the workshop sessions, and they ranged from pretty simple ones to few high impact ones, highly critical ones from a business perspective to kind of nice-to-be ones.  Now, it was with us to plan to get them delivered to the user acceptance testing environment.

It was too tempting to directly jump into construction activity.  But, we rightly took a firm decision to put together a functional design specification for those changes as priority, as we clearly understood the implications of prioritizing and committing for a timed delivery prior to understanding the impact of the changes in the current system, especially the complex ones.

Putting together a functional design specification (FDS) for a new change to be implemented in the product, will definitely prove to be beneficial in various aspects:

• Removes ambiguity – FDS removes all ambiguity while converting any new concept / requirement to technical design and real-time implementation. It brings the whole team to be on the same page, by the way it details out every single functional aspect and implication.  Putting the requirement in a document helps team brainstorm and provide a better insight on the requirement well ahead of initiation of development activity.
• Enhances Clarity in the Scope of change – This document will assist in defining the scope of the new change very clearly, thus avoiding gaps in understanding of requirement by all the stakeholders involved (including client, project manager, design and development team, DBAs, test team).  Any change that may need to be phased out can be worded accordingly and published for receiving buy-in from all stakeholders, thus helping set expectations in “black-and-white”.
• Supports Planning - Team will be able to get a good handle of impact, once the functional design is clearly stated in a document, thus they will be able to define an accurate delivery timeline that can be committed with the customer.
• Stabilizes Design – Documenting functional design stabilizes the design process and encourages technical design documentation prior to getting into construction. This in turn helps better communication of technical requirements to support teams like DBAs, senior and junior developers, and thus help avoid rework after final delivery
• Reinforces test team engagement - Test team will be able to utilize the document for putting together their test scenarios already while the design phase is in progress, thus giving them ample time to think through the test cases in detail as a result enabling high quality delivery.

 In summary, it is strongly suggested that the implementation leads encourage functional design specification documentation, provide high standards of requirements traceability, enhance relevant communication across stakeholders, excel in accurate planning, groom the team in improved design techniques and proactively engage the test team.

What are the other benefits you have reaped by inculcating the habit of documenting the functional design specification in your lead members?  Feel free to share your thoughts…