Why use specifications

Within these broad groupings are more particular types, including: brand-name specifications; brand-name-or-equal specifications; design specifications; performance specifications; and the Qualified Product List QPL. Its use will not be permitted unless only one product will meet an intended need, there are at least ten competitors that can supply the product, the department head has submitted written justification to this effect and the Director of Procurement has approved the use.

Any other brands or models substantially equivalent to those named are considered for award, with the Procurement Officer reserving the final right to determine equivalency.

Brand-name-or-equal specifications have a legitimate but limited place in public purchasing. Although there may be situations when the use of this specification is our only means of attempting to satisfy the requirement, its use should be limited and justified before solicitation. If this specification is used, tangible performance, quality or other required characteristics should be clearly defined in the bid invitation. Bidders offering an equal should be put on notice that the criteria used to define performance, quality or essential characteristics must be met to be considered responsive.

The best position is to list at least two brand names that will satisfy the requirements. Another alternative is the requirement that bidders offering products other than specified obtain approval for the product offered before bid opening. There must be sufficient basis to determine that these products are equal and this basis must be predicated upon sound evaluation criteria. Vendors should be provided the criteria for the purpose of qualifying the bid document. A QPL is predicated on a written specification which includes certain tests or other criteria for comparing, examining and approving products before soliciting competitive bids.

The Project Manager will be able to plan the work easily, create features that can be implemented right out of the documentation.

Quality Assurance engineers can test an application following the documentation. A technical requirement document empowers the team to come to a mutual understanding. If a project is really big it gets developed over a few years. Therefore you may need to know how a particular feature implemented a few years ago works. It helps to see the whole picture of how the project should work, thus helping the Quality Assurance engineer to ensure that features work as expected.

It saves money as it reduces the amount of time discussing the details of the project and the vision of a customer. The development team can misunderstand how features must function and implement them by their judgment. That can lead to spending more money rather than if they had documentation providing the information. In this case where a MIME type or namespace has an identifier, then this is obviously the crucial term to use to be unambiguous.

It is important to remember what you are defining as you write the text. For example, if you are defining a "foo-valid document" then using "is invalid" in the text can be assumed to apply to this but "is incorrect" or "is wrong" or "produces an error" does not unless the language is explicitly linked to the conformance term. When defining a language, whenever possible specify directly the meaning rather than the sort of thing you would expect some software to do with it.

Typical behaviors of an agent may be very useful to explain the intent non-normatively. You can tell people what something means, you can't tell them what to do about it, unless you are defining a protocol. When defining a protocol, then the constraints should ideally be given as a state transition diagram or table to make them totally clear.

When defining a message which in fact binds to human social entities, then this must be clear.