A spec is often started from a “Page-one” stage. On this stage, you’re answering some questions to yourself:

• What’s this feature?
• Why we bother to implement it?
• How to measure that we succefully done it?
• How the users will be using it?

I’m not experienced enough to make it a big topic but I want to share a tip which sometimes makes my spec look better:

When I look at my page-one spec over and over again, I would imagine that the spec is telling a story to a stranger. If the stranger gets the points, the spec is good. If not, the spec fails.

If it doesn’t feel real enough, I would try to explain to some guys not from a same team in the way I spec’ed. If they can understand, the spec works.

So this is my first Spec 101: Page one for strangers.