What is a Functional Requirement in Software Engineering?

A Functional Requirement (FR) is a description of the service that the software must offer. It describes a software system or its component. A function is nothing but inputs to the software system, its behavior, and outputs. It can be a calculation, data manipulation, business process, user interaction, or any other specific functionality which defines what function a system is likely to perform. Functional Requirements in Software Engineering are also called Functional Specification.

In software engineering and systems engineering, a Functional Requirement can range from the high-level abstract statement of the sender’s necessity to detailed mathematical functional requirement specifications. Functional software requirements help you to capture the intended behaviour of the system.

What should be included in the Functional Requirements Document?

Here is how to write functional requirements document:

Functional Requirements of a system should include the following things:

• Details of operations conducted in every screen
• Data handling logic should be entered into the system
• It should have descriptions of system reports or other outputs
• Complete information about the workflows performed by the system
• It should clearly define who will be allowed to create/modify/delete the data in the system
• How the system will fulfill applicable regulatory and compliance needs should be captured in the functional document

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