I need some advice. In my SRS I add screen shots of the pages of the application. Under the screen shot I add requirements that pertain to the fields on the screen shot. For example, if there is a Last Name field, I state how many characters it will accept, does it accept special characters, is it an input field, the errors related to the field...etc. Where do you write these types of requirements?
Ideally, these types of requirements would have already been captured as part of a separate business rules document repository or a data dictionary repository. In the SRS they are now system requirements and you run the risk of duplicating information.
For example, let's say that you have identified that "home phone number" is a piece of data which you need to capture. In the data dictionary you would have already identified "home phone number" as an attribute of a person. In the same place, you would specify other information about that attribute such as:
On small projects with small team you can, if you wish, put this information in the SRS. But you should still consider if you want to specify this info at the individual screen/page level or more global. What if the same piece of data appears on multiple screens/pages, will you want to specify the same rules every place the field appears. Probably not - since you don't want to have to maintain that info in multiple places.
Hope I've answered your question.
- Adrian
Thanks for your response Adrian! That does help. I'm assuming you would also put the error messages in the data dictionary? Taking your example of the "home phone number", if the user were to use an alpha character and the system needed to respond with an error message...?
Do you have any good data dictionary sample formats? Karl Wiegers Software Requirements book has one, but I was just seeing if there are some other good ones out there. Maybe that should just be another thread.
I'm not sure if I would put the error messages as part of the data dictionary. The error messages should probably be created in a separate list/dictionary and then referenced when needed. This way the messages can be maintained independently from the data or wehre they are used - perhaps maintained in a content management system.
You can then reference the messages from your SRS when they need to be displayed or from the business rules which cause the messages to be displayed.
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