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# The Specification

The functional specification provides all functional and technical information for application development or enhancement. It must provide the information that a writer needs to produce the user's guide and marketing materials, that programmers need to write or modify the code, and that QA needs to test the final product against the specification.

When all members of a project team (programmers, technical writers, quality assurance analysts, client support reps, and marketing and sales people) adhere to the functional specification, they are better able to develop, document, test, support, market and sell a solid system.

When you develop a new application, the functional specification serves as the basis for the technical documentation in the Developer Tool Kit, including the File Descriptions manual. When you enhance an application, the functional specification serves the same purpose, but it contains only the items that change.

Each area of the specification is defined below. Samples from the Inventory 5.10 Technical Specification are provided in the next section.