Design & Functional Specifications

Design and Functional Specifications Name: Student Number: Course Title: Course Code: Instructor’s Name: Institution: Date Due: Projects involved in systems development encompass the execution of all the activities that are involved from the time at which identification of a potential need is done, thereby leading to the full implementation and acceptance of the developed system to end user (Waters, 2004). This process often involves several stages that are carried out within a specified period of time. As part of the system development the need to formulate both design and functional specifications becomes inevitable. However, despite the fact that these two crucial documents are aimed at ensuring that the system development project is successfully implemented there is also a significant difference which exists between them (Bishop, 2003). Consequently the difference between design specifications and the functional specifications in system development is that the design specifications document is responsible of describing how the system will be built. Thus it takes into considerations the intended purposes of the system thereby translating them into a software and hardware design capable of been built (Gupta et al. 2008). However, the functional specifications document is mainly used in describing in details the intended appearance, capabilities as well as user interactions with the system to be developed. Therefore, the functional specifications can be regarded as a guideline and also a reference point for the system developers in the process of developing the system (Waxman, 1996). The functional specifications document for the development of an application program, consisting of a series of interactive dialogs and windows is supposed to be showing the user interface visual appearance while at the same time describing all the possible input actions that can be taken by the user as well as the response of the program to such actions. Moreover, sometimes the functional specifications tend to consist of formal descriptions concerning the user tasks and the system usability criteria (Bishop, 2003). This is contrary to the design specification do...