Writing a Technical Specification

nel

Hi,

i was just wondering if anyone could give any advice / good links on how to write a technical specification for a project. also things like what type of content it should contain and the layout / structure etc?

ive never done one of these before so im sitting looking at a blank word document!

BeaverC32

Rather than reinvent the wheel, try to find past documents at your company that served a similar purpose. You might just be surprised to find that a standard template already exists for this type of document.

nel

believe me ive tried that one already! but to no avail!

JDMurray

All specs start with a standard template and a style guide. It's unreasonable to expect a person who writes specs to also be the one to create the structure and style of the docs. This is usually done by a committee of people within the company or industry and professional technical writers and editors.

Try to find a company that has the same products or services and publishes similar documentation to what you are writing. Standards docs published by Cisco, IBM, HP, or other such businesses may have the format that you need. Government and military doc templates are usually overkill for commercial business needs.