Technical specification development services
in Washington, D.C.

A specification usually describes features. Screens, fields, buttons, reports. The requirements that decide whether the system survives real use tend to be missing, because nobody asked for them out loud.

Performance is the first. How many people use the system at once on a busy day? How much data will it hold after three years? A design that works for ten users and a thousand records can collapse at a hundred users and a million records.

Availability comes next. Some systems can be down for an hour on a Sunday. Others stop a business when they pause for a minute. Write down which kind this is, and what counts as an outage.

Security needs specific statements rather than a general wish. Who can see which records. How accounts are created and removed. What must be logged, and for how long. Which data has to stay inside a particular country or provider.

Accessibility belongs in the specification from the start. Retrofitting keyboard navigation and screen reader support after launch costs far more than building it in. Name the standard the system has to meet, and who will test against it.

Operations matter to the people who inherit the system. How is it deployed? How are backups taken and restored? What alerts go to whom when something fails? A vendor who hands over working software without these answers has handed over a problem.

Each of these items needs a measurable form, like the functional requirements beside them. A response time under stated conditions. A recovery point measured in hours. A list of roles and permissions.

Most of this is cheap to decide early and expensive to change late. An hour spent on the dull list before development starts often saves weeks after launch.

Ask the vendor to propose values where the client has no view. A reasoned proposal is easier to accept or reject than a blank line.