Process specification
Process Specification is a business term for the specification of a process. It is not unique to business activity, but can be applied to any organizational activity.
Within some structured methods, the capitalized term Process Specification refers to a description of the procedure to be followed by an actor within an elementary level business activity, as represented on a process model such as a dataflow diagram or IDEF0 model. A common alias is minispec, short for miniature specification.
01Use in systems development
The process specification defines what must be done to transform inputs into outputs. It is a detailed set of instructions outlining a business procedure that each elementary level business activity is expected to carry out. Process specifications are commonly included as integral components of requirements documents in systems development.
02Techniques
A variety of approaches can be used to produce a process specification, including:
- Decision tables
- Structured English (favored technique of most systems analysts)
- Pre/post conditions
- Use cases, basic course or events/alternate paths in use cases
- Flowcharts
- Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams
- UML Activity diagrams
No matter what approach is used, a specification must communicate to system development designers, implementers and support professionals, and be verifiable by stakeholders and end users.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Process specification”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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