Technical concept
In general, a technical concept is a concept in a specific field . The concrete use of the term differs in practice. Claus Rautenstrauch and Thomas Schulze define it as a "(semi-) formal, implementation-independent description of a business concept".
In particular, the technical concept describes the functional requirements for software and shows its application-related benefits. It describes the functionality primarily from the perspective of the user and system owner. It contains statements about information, rules, functions and processing steps that the future system must contain. Non-functional requirements such as usability , operability , traceability of the processing steps and testability can also be made.
The technical concept is to be seen as a demarcation to the technical concept, the IT concept . In the context of a tender , the technical concept can be used as part of the specification sheet . The technical concept also forms the basis for the instructions for use .
Appropriate perspective
The system supplier and the business administration department live in different working environments and work with different understanding models and therefore often only have a limited understanding of the respective counter-world and its work concepts. A successful technical concept must succeed in bridging the gap. Depending on the side on which the technical concept is written or on which side it has to be understood, the scope of the addressee, the description method, the level of detail or abstraction and the specialist language appropriate for the reader naturally vary.
If the system supplier creates the technical concept, it should be understandable from the client's reading perspective. If the technical concept is written by the commissioning specialist department, from the system supplier’s reading perspective, in addition to the usual precisely formulated prose, more technical or formal forms of the system description can also be used.
The technical concept can also use formal system descriptions such as UML , as long as it is guaranteed that the addressee of the technical concept is able to understand these descriptions. In the case of UML, use case and statechart diagrams are particularly useful in the technical concept phase . Such abstractions are technically oriented and are more suitable as a conceptual specification for the system developer than as a functional description for the specialist departments.
scope
An initial technical concept for a database can be described here as an example . Questions like:
- What is the database used for? (Process description)
- Which information should be saved, which can be omitted? (Process optimization)
- How is the data structured? (Rough structuring that does not yet contain any IT specifics)
- How big will the database be? (how big is the system)
- How much can the system cost?
Individual references and sources
- ↑ http://www.projektmagazin.de/glossar/gl-0095.html .
- ^ Claus Rautenstrauch, Thomas Schulze: Computer science for economists and business IT specialists . Springer, Berlin, 1st edition, ISBN 3-540-41155-0 .