Requirements documents are used to accurately and unambiguously convey the needs of a business. A business requirements document is a well-known ‘requirements’ document; however, there are other types of requirements documents that are also important in moving a project to completion. The requirements document template to use depends on the type of requirements you intend to capture. Organizations develop and adapt their own templates to meet their needs.
Business Requirements Document (BRD)
It defines the high-level business objectives and the main functions of a product. It is prepared by a business analyst or project manager. Contains sections to describe the project scope, functional, non-functional, data, and interface requirements. It provides a good understanding of the types of users and their expectations. It presents an idea of the proposed system from the point of view of the business organization commissioning the system.
Functional requirements document
Describes in detail the services provided by the system. It specifies the sequence of events, inputs, outputs, stored data, and computational processes for each function. Capture system behavior for every event and user action. Text descriptions are supported by wiring diagrams for better understanding.
Quality requirements document
This document describes the acceptance criteria for the final product. It establishes what end users expect of the system in terms of performance, response time, reliability, disaster recovery, fail-safe mechanisms, maintainability, accessibility, load handling capacity, portability, and robustness. These are also called non-functional requirements.
Technical Requirements Document
The software, hardware, and platform requirements of the final product are described in this document. The software requirements state what programming language the system must be developed in, what software will be used to access the system, and the type of database. The hardware requirements state the processor speed, memory size, disk space, network configuration, and the capacity of the application and database servers that will be deployed when the system goes live (deployment environment). production). The platform requirements establish the constraints on the system environment and the limitations on the technology that will be used during the construction of the system. If the system is to be deployed at multiple locations, the hardware and software environment for each location is described. The document lists the limitations that must be considered when designing the system architecture.
User interface requirements document
Describes the appearance of the system’s graphical user interface (GUI). Defines the positioning of the user input fields, messages, menus, header, and footer on the application screen. Explains how the user will access the screens and the sequence of user actions for each process. Contains mockup screenshots to give the project team an idea of what the final product will look like. Sample:
• How the content is presented to the user
• Color codes to use
• User navigation
• Hints/advice/suggestions to be displayed to the user on the screen
• “Save data and continue operation later” options when the user has to enter a large amount of data into the system
Shortcut keys for frequently used functions
Market Requirements Document (MRD)
Defines the needs of the end user of the system (that is, the customers of the company for which the system will be implemented). This document is prepared by marketing managers, product managers or business analysts. It defines the functions of the system according to the current market trend and the expectations of the target customer base. List the characteristics that give the company a competitive advantage in the marketplace.