Introduction
Technical requirements documents (TRDs) help software and engineering teams define a product’s use cases, responsibilities and timelines. This guide assists employees during the development process, leading to higher-quality products.
Discover how to write technical specs documents and enhance your team’s understanding and efficiency.
What’s a Technical Requirements Document?
Technical requirements documents outline the resources, goals and constraints for software and engineering projects. They aid people throughout the development process, ensuring teams uphold quality standards and external stakeholders understand the product’s importance.
This type of software documentation clarifies your product's benefits, features and limitations. Most importantly, these guides outline how your team intends to approach development, keeping everyone on the same page.
Benefits of a Technical Requirements Document
Outlining product requirements has many advantages — here’s a summary of the most impactful benefits:
- Better decision-making: Crucial insights like budgets, schedules and communication strategies help teams align on their goals.
- Enhanced transparency: An overview offers all team members and external stakeholders a clear understanding of project goals and deliverables.
- Transparent quality standards: A requirements document lets you easily monitor progress by comparing outputs to predetermined success criteria.
- Risk mitigation: Identifying the impact and probability of risks helps you create strategies to minimize or eliminate them.
- Aligned expectations: Establishing objectives and expectations reduces the risk of scope creep.
- Improved delegation: Outlining technical requirements allows you to assign developers tasks matching their skills.
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What To Include in a Technical Requirements Document
A technical requirements document typically has the following elements:
- Introduction: This quick explanation provides context and describes the document’s purpose, helping the reader immediately understand the guide’s use and importance.
- Executive summary: Descriptions cover the product’s target audience, goals, project scope and market need.
- Functional requirements: In this section, you outline the product’s primary features and describe what users should be able to do with it.
- Nonfunctional requirements: These aren’t the main features, but they contribute to the product’s usability, including responsiveness, accessibility and security.
- Assumptions and dependencies: This section helps you prepare for potential roadblocks by listing constraints, competitors, risks and limited resources.
- Revision log: This simple record of document updates helps you monitor product changes.
- References and links: Include additional resources, such as articles, videos and a glossary of technical terms.
How To Write a Technical Requirements Document
If you’re ready to create a technical document for your development team and stakeholders, follow these steps.
1. Collect Information
To gather the information listed in the previous section, reach out to your internal team and external stakeholders, such as:
- Product owners: Learn more about the product’s main features and functionalities.
- Developers: Talk to the development team to understand the project’s technical goals, constraints and best practices.
- User experience and interface designers: Discuss the product’s appearance and navigation.
- Support teams: Address the product’s launch and maintenance.
- End users: Collect insights from target audiences to identify their needs and pain points.
Say you're creating a technical requirements document for a banking app. Product owners outline three key features: balance viewing, bill payments and budgeting tools. Developers explain how these integrate with existing systems, and designers share ideal navigation layouts. And after talking with potential users, you note they also want a separate tab for loan recommendations.
2. Understand Your Audience
Beyond the product’s features, you need to understand how your customers will likely use the product. This means you’ll put the right effort into each stage of development.
The banking app's primary audience is adults in their 30s–40s. Conducting a user survey reveals that this demographic often uses their bank app to send money to friends. With this knowledge, you’d know to prioritize simple peer-to-peer transactions during development.
3. Determine the Project Life Cycle
Gather the product features, user needs and desired outcomes and plan out your project life cycle, including:
- Workflow: Identify each stage of the development process, such as design, testing and deployment.
- Tasks: Describe the necessary steps in each stage, and create related diagrams or flowcharts as supportive visual guides.
- Team responsibilities: Assign teammates to different duties, delegating based on skills and capacity.
- Timeline: Determine deadlines and milestones for each step of the process.
For the banking app project, define a nine-week launch timeline in your technical requirements document. Start with the creation of wireframes to outline the app's layout. Then, detail the development phase, where teams finalize the code for each page. Describe how designers will enhance the app’s visual elements to improve the user experience. Finally, outline the testing phase, which involves gathering feedback from potential users and making necessary adjustments.
4. Consider System Qualities
Keep in mind core details that determine your product’s overall usability and quality, including:
- Performance: Think about the product’s intended load capacity, which affects performance and response time.
- Maintenance and service: Determine how easy your product is to maintain and upgrade. Consider peak usage times before scheduling maintenance and updates.
- Scalability: Ensure your product can adapt to a changing user base without impacting the product’s functionality and quality.
- Security: Carefully plan your product’s security features, including authentication and encrypted information.
Perhaps the banking app can handle up to 10,000 users at once, and the company expects that to grow by 50% over the next year. To keep users' data secure, the app offers two-factor authentication. And to avoid disrupting regular service, updates go out in the middle of the night when people are least likely to be banking.
5. Use the Right Tools
Manually creating a technical requirements document can be daunting, but technical documentation software helps you manage the entire process, from initial structuring to distribution.
Using Scribe, you can place your technical information into premade templates to quickly assemble a detailed resource. Our document generator will also build technical guides as you work — then you’ll hop in, edit a few details and make it your own. For even more in-depth manuals, use Scribe Pages to combine guides into one comprehensive document.
When you’re done, easily share and distribute your creation via a link, an embed or a downloadable file. Your team can then give you quick feedback through emoji reactions and comments.
Technical Requirements Document Best Practices
When crafting these guides, here are a few tips and tricks to keep in mind:
- Use straightforward language: Write with basic terminology whenever possible, and include clear definitions if technical terms are necessary. These documents are for both technical and nontechnical readers and should be accessible to everyone.
- Be concise: Use actionable language and short sentences so your guide is easier to understand. And structure your document with bulleted lists and clear headers to separate different points.
- Review and validate: Verify the scope and requirements of your product before finalizing your document. Check the technical details with your development team and make sure the goals align with what external stakeholders expect.
- Prioritize requirements and features: Determine which functions are necessary and which are simply nice to have. This lets you allocate resources, time and funds appropriately.
- Use visual aids: Use diagrams, screenshots, GIFs or videos wherever possible to improve clarity.
Elevate Your Team’s Technical Understanding With Scribe
Creating technical products is a complex process, but writing guides doesn't have to be. Add Scribe to your workflow so you can generate documents faster. Start with one of our free templates, like the product requirements document presentation template, and fill it out with your product’s features, tasks and timeline.
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FAQs
How Do You Write a TRD?
As you start planning a technical project, follow these steps to outline guides:
- Collect information.
- Understand your audience.
- Determine the project life cycle.
- Consider system qualities.
- Use the right tools.
Clarifying the project’s goals and limitations will help development teams create a product that will address people’s needs.
What Does a Good Requirements Document Look Like?
Clear requirements documentation includes the following sections:
- Introduction.
- Executive summary.
- Functional requirements.
- Nonfunctional requirements.
- Assumptions and dependencies.
- Revision log.
- References and links.
When outlining this information, use clear headers, ample whitespace and bulleted lists to make the document easier to read. And when possible, pair each step with visuals to improve understanding.
