Specification

A specification is an explicit set of requirements to be satisfied by a material, product, or service

Use of a Specification
In engineering, manufacturing, and business, it is vital for suppliers, purchasers, and users of materials, products, or services to understand and agree upon all requirements. A specification is a type of a standard which is often referenced by a contract or procurement document. It provides the necessary details about the specific requirements. Specifications may be written by government agencies, standards organizations (ASTM, ISO, CEN, etc), trade associations, corporations, and others. A product specification does not necessarily prove the product to be correct. Just because an item is stamped with a specification number does not, by itself, indicate that the item is fit for any particular use. The people who use the item (engineers, trade unions, etc) or specify the item (building codes, government, industry, etc) have the responsibility to consider the available specifications, specify the correct one, enforce compliance, and use the item correctly. Validation of suitability is necessary. An example of a US Federal specification is FIPS-PUB 159, Detail Specification for 62.5-m Core Diameter/125-m Cladding Diameter Class Ia Multimode Optical Fibers. (Source: from Federal Standard 1037C and from MIL-STD-188)

Content of a Specification
A specification might include:

Descriptive title and scope of the specification Date of last effective revision and revision designation Person, office, or agency responsible for questions on the specification, updates, and deviations. The significance or importance of the specification and its intended use. Terminology and definitions to clarify the meanings of the specification Test methods for measuring all specified characteristics Material requirements: physical, mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc. Targets and tolerances. Performance requirements. Targets and tolerances. Workmanship Certifications required. Safety considerations and requirements Environmental considerations and requirements

Quality requirements, Sampling (statistics), inspections, acceptance criteria Person, office, or agency responsible for enforcement of the specification. Completion and delivery. Provisions for rejection, re inspection, rehearing, corrective measures

Process Capability Considerations

A good engineering specification, by itself, does not necessarily imply that all products sold to that specification actually meet the listed targets and tolerances. Actual production of any material, product, or service involves inherent variation of output. With a normal distribution, the tails of production may extend well beyond plus and minus three standard deviarions from the process average. The process capability of materials and products needs to be compatible with the specified engineering tolerances. Process controls must be in place and an effective Quality management system, such as Total Quality Management, needs to keep actual production within the desired tolerances. Effective enforcement of a specification is necessary for it to be useful

Construction specifications in North America

Specifications in North America form part of the contract documents that accompany and govern the construction of a building. The guiding master document is the National MasterFormat. It is a consensus document that is jointly sponsored by two professional organisations:

Construction Specifications Canada Construction Specifications Institute

While there is a tendency to believe that "Specs overrule Drawings" in the event of discrepancies between the text document and the drawings. The actual intent is for drawings and specifications to be complimentary with neither taking precedence over the other. The Specifications fall into 50 "Divisions", or broad categories of work involved in construction. The "Divisions" are subdivided into "Sections", that address specific workscopes. For instance, firestopping is addressed in Section 078400 - Firestopping. It forms part of the Division 7, which is Thermal and Moisture Protection. Division 7 also addresses building envelope and fireproofing work. Each Section is subdivided into three distinct areas: "General", "Products" and "Execution". The National MasterFormat system has been uniformly applied to residential, commercial and much though not all industrial work. 2

Specifications can be another "performance-based", whereby the specifier restricts the text to stating the performance that must be achieved in each Section of work, or "prescriptive", whereby the specifier indicates specific products, vendors and even contractors that are acceptable for each workscope. While North American specifications are usually restricted to broad descriptions of the work, European ones can include actual work quantities, including such things as area of drywall to be built in square metres, like a bill of materials. This type of specification is a collaborative effort between a specwriter and a quantity surveyor. This approach is unusual in North America, where each bidder performs his or her own quantity survey on the basis of both drawings and specifications. Specification writing is a professional trade with its own professional designations, such as "CCS", which means "Certified Construction Specifier". Specwriters can be either employees of or sub-contractors to architects. Specwriters frequently meet with manufacturers of building materials who seek to have their products "specified" on upcoming construction projects so that contractors can include their products in the estimates leading to their proposals.

Food and drug specifications

Pharmaceutical products can usually be tested and qualified by various Pharmacopoeia. Current existing pronounced standards include:

British Pharmacopoeia European Pharmacopoeia Japanese Pharmacopoeia The International Pharmacopoeia United States Pharmacopoeia

If any pharmaceutical product is not covered by the above standards, it can be evaluated by the additional source of Pharmacopoeia from other nations, from industrial specifications. or from standardized formulary such as

British National Formulary for Children British National Formulary National Formulary

A similar approach is adopted by the food manufacturing, of which Codex Alimentarius ranks the hightest standards, followed by regional and national standards [1].

The coverage of food and drug standards by ISO is currently less fruitfull and not yet put forward as an urgent agenda due to the tight restrictions of regional or national constitution Specifications and other standards exist not only for the food or pharmaceutical product but also for the processing machinery, quality processes, packaging, etc.

Software development
Formal specification
A formal specification is a mathematical description of software or hardware that may be used to develop an implementation. It describes what the system should do, not (necessarily) how the system should do it. Given such a specification, it is possible to use formal verification techniques to demonstrate that a candidate system design is correct with respect to the specification. This has the advantage that incorrect candidate system designs can be revised before a major investment has been made in actually implementing the design. An alternative approach is to use provably correct refinement steps to transform a specification into a design, and ultimately into an actual implementation, that is correct by construction.

Program specification
A program specification is the definition of what a computer program is expected to do. It can be informal, in which case it can be considered as a blueprint or user manual from a developer point of view, or formal, in which case it has a definite meaning defined in mathematical or programmatic terms. In practice, most successful specifications are written to understand and fine-tune applications that were already well-developed, although safety-critical software systems are often carefully specified prior to application development. Specifications are most important for external interfaces that must remain stable.

Functional specification
In software development, a functional specification (also, functional spec or specs or functional specifications document (FSD)) is the set of documentation that describes the behavior of a computer program or larger software system. The documentation typically describes various inputs that can be provided to the software system and how the system responds to those inputs Product design specification A product design specification (PDS) is a statement of what a product to be designed is intended to do. Its aim is to ensure the development of a product meets the needs of the user.[1] 4

The PDS acts as an initial boundary in the development of products. However, it will naturally evolve as it is progressed through the different stages of the design process.

Information included in a PDS

A PDS is not limited to the function the product is designed to perform. It will consider issues as diverse as

Performance (e.g. speed, power) Weight and size Operating environment (during storage, transport, installation and use) Target cost Appearance Ergonomic issues Life expectancy of the product End-of-life disposal Safety issues Standards or industry codes of practice Existing patents in the specific area. Quantity of production Maintenance that may be available to the product. Intended time of market release

The relative importance of the factors considered in a PDS depends on the specific area of design and the particular application.

PDS vs. product specification

The PDS is a specification of what is required but not the specification of the product itself. Describing the actual product is done in the technical specification, once the product has been designed. The difference is important since describing the product itself at the stage of creating a PDS, effectively constraints the range of alternatives that are considered during the design process.[1]

PDS vs. design brief

The PDS evolves from the design brief. While the design brief outlines the design goal and major constraints and considerations, the PDS goes further to determine the precise limits for the full set of requirements in the product being designed.[4]

Formal specification

A formal specification is a mathematical description of software or hardware that may be used to develop an implementation. It describes what the system should do, not (necessarily) how the system should do it. Given such a specification, it is possible to use formal verification techniques to demonstrate that a candidate system design is correct with respect to the specification. This has the advantage that incorrect candidate system designs can be revised before a major investment has been made in actually implementing the design. An alternative approach is to use provably correct refinement steps to transform a specification into a design, and ultimately into an actual implementation, that is correct by construction. It is important to note that a design (or implementation) cannot ever be declared correct in isolation, but only correct with respect to a given specification. Whether the formal specification correctly describes the problem to be solved is a separate issue. It is also a difficult issue to address, since it ultimately concerns the problem constructing abstracted formal representations of an informal concrete problem domain, and such an abstraction step is not amenable to formal proof. However, it is possible to validate a specification by proving challenge theorems concerning properties that the specification is expected to exhibit. If correct, these theorems reinforce the specifiers understanding of the specification and its relationship with the underlying problem domain. If not, the specification probably needs to be changed to better reflect the domain understanding of those involved with producing (and implementing) the specification. The Z notation is an example of a leading formal specification language. Others include the Specification Language(VDM-SL) of the Vienna Development Method and the Abstract Machine Notation (AMN) of the B-Method.

Specification language
A specification language is a formal language used in computer science. Unlike most programming languages, which are directly executable formal languages used to implement a system, specification languages are used during systems analysis, requirements analysis and systems design. An example of a specification language is the Unified Modelling Language. Specification languages are generally not directly executed. They describe the system at a much higher level than a programming language. Indeed, it is considered as an error if a requirement specification is cluttered with unnecessary implementation detail, because the specification is meant to describe the what, not the how. A common fundamental assumption of many specification approaches is that programs are modelled as algebraic or model-theoretic structures that include a collection of sets of data values together with functions over those sets. This level of abstraction is commensurate with the view that the correctness of the input/output behaviour of a program takes precedence over all its other properties. In the property-oriented approach to specification (taken e.g. by CASL), specifications of programs consist mainly of 6

logical axioms, usually in a logical system in which equality has a prominent role, describing the properties that the functions are required to satisfy - often just by their interrelationship. This is in contrast to so-called model-oriented specifications in frameworks like VDM and Z, which consist of a simple realization of the required behaviour. Specifications must be subject to a process of refinement (the filling-in of implementation detail) before they can actually be implemented. The result of such a refinement process is an executable algorithm, which is either formulated in a programming language, or in an executable subset of the specification language at hand. For example, Hartmann pipelines, when properly applied, may be considered a dataflow specification which is directly executable. Another example is the Actor model which has no specific application content and must be specialized to be executable

Standardization
Standardization (or standardisation) is the process of developing and agreeing upon technical standards. A standard is a document that establishes uniform engineering or technical specifications, criteria, methods, processes, or practices. Some standards are mandatory while others are voluntary. Some standards are de facto, meaning a norm or requirement which has an informal but dominant status. Some standards are de jure, meaning formal legal requirements. Formal standards bodies such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or the American National Standards Institute are independent of the manufacturers of the goods for which they publish standards. The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers (commodification), compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality. In social sciences, including economics, the idea of standardization is close to the solution for a coordination problem, a situation in which all parties can realize mutual gains, but only by making mutually consistent decisions. Standardization is the process for select better choices and ratificate this consistent decisions, as an obtained standard. This view includes the case of "spontaneous standardization processes", to produce de facto standards

Usage
Standardization is the process of establishing a technical standard, which could be a standard specification, standard test method, standard definition, standard procedure (or practice), etc. It can also be viewed as a mechanism for optimizing economic use of scarce resources such as forests, which are threatened by paper manufacture. As an example, all of Europe now uses 240 volt 50 Hz AC mains grids and GSM mobile phones, and measures lengths in meters. The United Kingdom has officially accepted metres for business purposes but feet and inches are still widely used by the general public.

The existence of a published standard does not necessarily imply that it is useful or correct. Just because an item is stamped with a standard number does not, by itself, indicate that the item is fit for any particular use. The people who use the item or service (engineers, trade unions, etc) or specify it (building codes, government, industry, etc) have the responsibility to consider the available standards, specify the correct one, enforce compliance, and use the item correctly. Validation of suitability is necessary. In the context of social criticism and social sciences, standardization often means the process of establishing standards of various kinds and improving efficiency to handle people, their interactions, cases, and so forth. Examples include formalization of judicial procedure in court, and establishing uniform criteria for diagnosing mental disease. Standardization in this sense is often discussed along with (or synonymously to) such large-scale social changes as modernization, bureaucratization, homogenization, and centralization of society. In the context of business information exchanges, standardization refers to the process of developing data exchange standards for specific business processes using specific syntaxes. These standards are usually developed in voluntary consensus standards bodies such as the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT), the World Wide Web Consortium W3C, and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). Standards can be:

de facto standards which means they are followed by informal convention or dominant usage. de jure standards which are part of legally binding contracts, laws or regulations. Voluntary standards which are published and available for people to consider for use

In general, each country or economy has a single recognized National Standards Body (NSB). Examples include ABNT, ANSI, BSI, DGN, DIN, IRAM, JISC, KATS, SABS, SAC, SCC, SIS, SNZ. An NSB is likely the sole member from that economy in ISO. NSBs may be either public or private sector organizations, or combinations of the two. For example, the three NSBs of Canada, Mexico and the United States are respectively the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the General Bureau of Standards (Direccin General de Normas, DGN), and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). SCC is a Canadian Crown Corporation, DGN is a governmental agency within the Mexican Ministry of Economy, and ANSI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization with members from both the private and public sectors. The determinates of whether an NSB for a particular economy is a public or private sector body may include the historical and traditional roles that the private sector fills in public affairs in that economy or the development stage of that economy.

Many specifications that govern the operation and interaction of devices and software on the Internet are in use. To preserve the word "standard" as the domain of relatively disinterested bodies such as ISO, the W3C, for example, publishes "Recommendations", and the IETF publishes "Requests for Comments" (RFCs). These publications are sometimes referred to as being standards. Drafts and working documents should not be considered as formal published standards. In a military context, standardization can be defined as: The development and implementation of concepts, doctrines, procedures and designs to achieve and maintain the required levels of compatibility, interchangeability or commonality in the operational, procedural, material, technical and administrative fields to attain interoperability. Note: there are at least four levels of standardization: compatibility, interchangeability, commonality and reference. These standardization processes create compatibility, similarity, measurement and symbol standards.

Other uses

In herbal medicine standardization refers to providing processed plant material that meets a specified concentration of a specific marker constituent. However plant constituents have synergy and even active constituent concentrations may be misleading measures of potency if cofactors are not present. A further problem is that the important constituent is often unknown. For instance St. Johnswort is often standardized to hypericin which is now known not to be the "active ingredient'. Other companies standardize to hyperforin or both, although there may be some 24 known possible constituents. Different companies use different markers, or different levels of the same markers, or different methods of testing for marker compounds. Herbalist and manufacturer David Winston points out that whenever different compounds are chosen as "active ingredients" for different herbs, there is a chance that suppliers will get a substandard batch (low on the chemical markers) and mix it with a batch higher in the desired marker to compensate for the difference.[1] In statistics, standardization refers to conversion to standard scores. In test theory, standardization refers to measurements or assessments conducted under exact, specified, and repeatable conditions. In supply chain management, standardization refers to approaches for increasing commonality of either part, process, product or procurement. Such change will enable delayed making of manufacturing or procurement decisions, thus reducing variability found in having many non-standard components. From a New institutional economics point of view, standardization process starts with a social problem known as "coordination dilemma". Standards, as "voluntary norms", serve to facilitate the resolution of coordination dilemmas and realize mutual gains; then standard refer also to a kind of social dilemma solution.

Types
Types of standardization process:

Emergence as de facto standard: tradition, market domination, etc. Written by a Standards organization: o in an impositive process: written by edict by a regulator, etc. o in a closed consensus process: Restricted membership (for example, a trade association) and having formal procedures for due-process among voting members o in a full consensus process: usually open to all interested and qualified parties and with formal procedures for due-process considerations.

Open standard
An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it. The terms "open" and "standard" have a wide range of meanings associated with their usage. The term "open" is usually restricted to royalty-free technologies while the term "standard" is sometimes restricted to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis. The definitions of the term "open standard" used by academics, the European Union and some of its member governments or parliaments such as Denmark, France, and Spain preclude open standards requiring fees for use, as does the Venezuelan Government. On the standard organisation side, the W3C ensures that its specifications can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis. Many definitions of the term "standard" permit patent holders to impose "reasonable and non-discriminatory" royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers and/or users of the standard. For example, the rules for standards published by the major internationally recognized standards bodies such as the IETF[1], ISO, and IEC permit their Standards to contain specifications whose implementation will require payment of patent licensing fees (none of these organizations states that they grant "open standards", but only "standards"). ITU has a definition of "open standard" that allows "reasonable and non-discriminatory" licensing. The term "open standard" is sometimes coupled with "open source" with the idea that a standard is not truly open if it does not have a complete free/open source reference implementation available. [2] Open standards which specify formats are sometimes referred to as open formats.

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Many specifications that are sometimes referred to as standards are proprietary and only available under restrictive contract terms (if they can be obtained at all) from the organization that owns the copyright on the specification. As such these specifications are not considered to be fully Open.

Technical standard
A technical standard is an established norm or requirement. It is usually a formal document that establishes uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes and practices. A technical standard can also be a controlled artifact or similar formal means used for calibration. Reference Standards and certified reference materials have an assigned value by direct comparison with a reference base. A primary standard is usually under jurisdication of a national standards body. Secondary, tertiary, check standards and standard materials may be used for reference in a metrology system. This article discusses formal technical standards. A custom, convention, company product, corporate standard, etc which becomes generally accepted and dominant is often called a de facto standard. A technical standard can be developed privately or unilaterally, for example by a corporation, regulatory body, military, etc. Standards can also be developed by groups such as trade unions, and trade associations. Standards organizations usually have more diverse input and usually develop voluntary standards: these might become mandatory if adopted by a government, business contract, etc. The standardization process may be by edict or may involve the formal consensus [1] of technical experts.

Types of Standards
The primary types of technical standards are:

A standard specification is an explicit set of requirements for an item, material, component, system or service. It is often used to formalize the technical aspects of a procurement agreement or contract. For example, there may be a specification for a turbine blade for a jet engine which defines the exact material and performance requirements. A standard test method describes a definitive procedure which produces a test result. It may involve making a careful personal observation or conducting a highly technical measurement. For example, a physical property of a material is often affected by the precise method of testing: any reference to the property should therefore reference the test method used.

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A standard procedure (or standard practice) gives a set of instructions for performing operations or functions. For example, there are detailed standard operating procedures for operation of a nuclear power plant. A standard guide is general information or options which do not require a specific course of action. A standard definition is formally established terminology

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