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Preparing a set of requirements or a specifications document is another crucial step in creating an application. An entire industry has sprung up around writing specifications for software development with many different approaches and results. All the approaches are trying to compensate for the fact that users tend to take paths through our application and try to do things with our application, that as developers we would never in our wildest dreams have imagined. A user interacting with an application never does though in a straight line, as much as we developers would like to think that we'll lead users along page by page. This is especially true for web site applications, and our whole sub industry has been created around writing specifications for web applications. For the purposes of our "Where's Tom" application, we'll use a fairly simple and straight forward process of describing the functionality that should be available in this application. I'm going to use a form that I developed several years ago to capture the information I needed for each specific project. You can use whatever process is most helpful to you but the end result should be a clear, comprehensive description of your web application. The goal for the specification is to be able to hold it up to the web site at the conclusion of your work And check up each set of functionality, of course specifications always, no matter how good they are change throughout the life of the project. So once you've got a complete specification it must be kept up to date. First we'll describe this application in one or two paragraphs. If you aren't able to do this, you've got problems right after the bat. Go back to your client or your boss to get a better idea of what you are doing. Try to succinctly state the purpose of the application it'ss reason for being created and then summarize the application. Here's our summary for "Where's Tom". Colleagues of Tom have been unable to find him for important meetings or golf games and would like to be able to find out where he is, where he's been, and where he's scheduled to tee off next. Users will be able to view Tom's schedule for that moment, for the past, and for the future. Users will be able to send email to Tom. Where's Tom will be available as a web service. There's one section missing in this summary. So we'll add it now. At the end we'll add that Tom will enter his schedule through a password-protected Admin area. In addition to this brief summary, we'll need to detail each section of the application. Here's the detailed description of the public area of the application. Users clicking on Where's Tom at the Q3 studios site will go to the Where's Tom main page. The main page will display links for Now, Then, and Later. When a user clicks "Now", a description of Tom's whereabouts at that moment will display. The description will include: The day, date and time. Tom's activity - in other words what he's doing, Tom's location, a photo of Tom at that location if one is available, and we want to make a note here to see the story board or design and layout of this display. This is a good start to our specifications. There's quite a bit more to it but I'll fill that out later so that we can continue now. good start to our specifications. There's quite a bit more to it but I'll fill that out later so that we can continue now.