Specification (technical standard)A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard. There are different types of technical or engineering specifications (specs), and the term is used differently in different technical contexts. They often refer to particular documents, and/or particular information within them. The word specification is broadly defined as "to state explicitly or in detail" or "to be specific".
Functional specificationA functional specification (also, functional spec, specs, functional specifications document (FSD), functional requirements specification) in systems engineering and software development is a document that specifies the functions that a system or component must perform (often part of a requirements specification) (ISO/IEC/IEEE 24765-2010). The documentation typically describes what is needed by the system user as well as requested properties of inputs and outputs (e.g. of the software system).
Requirements engineeringRequirements engineering (RE) is the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements in the engineering design process. It is a common role in systems engineering and software engineering. The first use of the term requirements engineering was probably in 1964 in the conference paper "Maintenance, Maintainability, and System Requirements Engineering", but it did not come into general use until the late 1990s with the publication of an IEEE Computer Society tutorial in March 1997 and the establishment of a conference series on requirements engineering that has evolved into the International Requirements Engineering Conference.
Software architectureSoftware architecture is the set of structures needed to reason about a software system and the discipline of creating such structures and systems. Each structure comprises software elements, relations among them, and properties of both elements and relations. The architecture of a software system is a metaphor, analogous to the architecture of a building. It functions as the blueprints for the system and the development project, which project management can later use to extrapolate the tasks necessary to be executed by the teams and people involved.
