Trinh Hieu Trung

One good question with several great answers from BA Forum of LinkedIn. Yeah, LinkedIn guys are always professional, enthusiastic and straight to the point.

Question:

What is the difference between Business Requirements Specification (BRS) & Functional Requirements Specification (FRS)?

* What is your prospective about the difference between BRS & FRS?
* How does FRS differ from Solution Design and what goes in each of the document?
* Who develops BRS, FRS and Solution design? i.e BA, Developer etc!

Your help will be appreciated.

Cheers,
Anish Lakhani
Business Analyst at UniSuper Private Limited

Answers:

To state in brief, BRS states the ‘what’ of the system, whereas FRS states the ‘how’. In my experience, both BRS and FRS are prepared by BA. I think design (ERD, Data Dictionary etc.) in generally not within the scope of BA activities. Note that design will be done differently for products as compared to projects.

Sunil Mundra
Domain Expert in retail loan origination systems and visiting faculty at a management education institute

Hi. BRS is actually a document that covers the business aspect of a requirement on a broad level. For eg: lets consider that you want develop a new website. Your BRS would address what business is your website being built for. Lets say it is a website like ebay and it allows people to shop online. This would be your business requirement covered in the BRS.

Now the FRS would actually address each function that the website provides in order to make the shopping experience of the people visiting the website efficient and easy. Not just this it would also address issues of security etc that may need to be built into this wedsite.

Both the BR and FR can actually be addressed in the same document. However, this depends on the organization.

Both BRS and FRS are made by the BA who captures the requirements from the end user. A developer would be involved in making a technical document which would address the technical design of the website which the BA may or may not concern himself with.

Hope this helps. Cheers.

Ravneeth Takkhi
Business Analyst at Broadridge

BRS are the requirements as stated by the businesspeople. In common, the business tells “what” they want without being specific. And more important they are usable in situations where you do not even have to know about a specific information system. FRS are THE SAME requirements made more specific, “how”, and do meet the daily use in information systems but still globally. One level deeper there are system requirements (or: CSR: Customer System Requirements), custom made on HOW to implement. CSR are ready to take over by a technical designer.

I hope my explanation is clear, otherwise ask!

Wilco Charité
Owner, Business and Information Analyst at CHAR-IT

I have been involved in ICT and analysis for 11 years now… often acting in different roles on projects. I am sure you all realise there is no hard and fast rules in our discipline… but merely guidelines.
Personally I found that:

1.The BRS should not be on a “broad level” unless that was your specific mandate. A proper BRS should be as specific as possible (hence the term “specification”).

2.The BRS should answer the “what is needed” question ONLY. I found that users/clients would sometimes insist on having specific design requirements in this document. I always advise such clients that I will rather draft the FRS containing that type of detail.

3.The BRS should always be in a format that the business will understand and should contain narration and diagrams that will make sense to the user/client. This might sometimes require you to be creative with regards to modelling (but being creative is what distinguish a good BA from a not so good one).

Conrad van Dyk
Business Analyst for 9 years