1

Developing functional specifications is never a pleasurable experience, but I kind of find a sick pleasure in planning a project well. I think I have some father issues.

Regardless of my own issues, I can find any number of articles on how to create a single functional spec in varying degrees of usefulness. There are templates and examples aplenty, and I've got a good library of my own. However I am finding it difficult to find anyone who discusses a manner in which to produce multiple functional specs with any efficiency.

Does anyone know of a source discussing how to manage the process of quickly generating disparate types of functional specs? Say a company that delivers web apps, perhaps using a rapid development tool like ColdFusion or PhoneGap or something where the experience lies within the use of the tool not the end result. So the functional specs can have a wonderful array of difference in them.

Can anyone point me towards a way of managing this process to ease the burden of building each of these from scratch?

EDIT - I really like OmniGraffle, however I'm not trying to maintain a look and feel or do anything visual (saving past screen shots might be useful if they can be indexed). Code Snippets seems closer to what I wanted. But in actuality I think I am looking for the method to archive/index past blocks of text.

So if I described a purchase order system a year ago and I am building something similar today, I want to find that functional spec from a year ago to have some example text to start from.

In my head this is liek some novel writing software where like code snippets a block of text (either a scene, chapter or blurb or whatever can be written and then moved aroudn int eh body of the whole. yWriter does this. However I need to find a way to index/search through these large chunks of text for relevance. I am hoping to learn more about that kind of system.

ashcanschool
  • 319
  • 3
  • 18
  • Just, FWIW, this may be a better question for [Programmers](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions) or [Project Management](http://pm.stackexchange.com/) – New Alexandria Jun 18 '14 at 22:43
  • Now that you've mentioned programmers or Project Management they do look like better areas to ask this question. Is there a way of moving a question without deleting and writing a new question? – ashcanschool Jun 19 '14 at 08:36

1 Answers1

1

Fleshing out the ambiguity

  1. If you are asking about templates that are primarily textual, then your best bet is probably just to have a 'stationary' file that you can open a copy, adding pieces that are copies of the template structure you've saved to the 'stationary', and then save out the draft spec.

  2. If you are referring to diagrams and other visual schematic that follow a 'spec language' that is unique to your development framework, then I would suggest a tool like OmniGraffle, Visio, or LucidCharts, which have active communities that develop 'stencil libraries' (e.g. graffletopia)

I think you more mean #1, in which case you might look to examples like OmniOutliner templates which can contain sophisticated stylization of fonts and format, akin to 'type styles' in Word documents.

Code Snippets are one mechanism for solving this, but you will only get snippet libraries for programming IDEs, which generally will lack text style features. Code Snippet libraries are like text macros: short strips that expand into large blocks of text. You could create your own snippets for the different structures of project spec that related to each kind of framework.

Another solution is to leverage the file interoperability of tools like OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner (or other pairings). WhenOmniGraffle opens an Outliner file, it displays the list structure as a tree of objects/nodes. After adding more nodes, the OmniGraffle file can be re-opened in OmniOutliner and viewed as a list, with all the attached Outliner styles.

This is a nice multi-modal approach, but locks you into a toolset. Probably unavoidable until more people demand tooling to do this kind of thing.

New Alexandria
  • 6,951
  • 4
  • 57
  • 77