A Global Standard for Specification and Business Documentation
How to use: The standard is available for download in two convenient formats, ready for immediate integration—whether you are implementing standard organizational instructions or configuring AI agents designed for automated internal documentation validation. You can also visit our GitHub repository to view releases and join open-source discussions.
The documentation must explicitly provide precise time tracking for information context. Mandatory elements include clearly visible creation date and last modification date timestamps.
The initial section (or metadata area) must contain a concise summary defining the core topic, business objective, and intent behind the document creation.
The document must explicitly state its author (person or role), version number, and current lifecycle state (e.g., Draft / In Review / Approved / Deprecated).
Substantive elements must be clearly separated by information type (e.g., strictly distinguishing business requirements from business rules, constraints, or assumptions).
The document must maintain consistent terminology throughout. All acronyms must be expanded upon first use or listed in a dedicated section, and acceptable synonyms explicitly declared.
The document must feature a section and heading structure appropriate for its purpose and consistent with the established template for its document family (e.g., Requirements template, Architecture template).
The document must contain only necessary information, eliminating noise. Descriptions must be unambiguous, concrete, and free from vague qualifiers, balancing space efficiency with high precision.
Complex processes, business logic, architecture, and data structures must be visually represented using established formal modeling notations to ensure clarity and eliminate ambiguity. Textual descriptions must maintain 100% alignment with the visual models.
The document must include metadata tags, labels, and links to establish its broader organizational context and enable cross-referencing with related documentation.
The document must explicitly name a single individual (a human, not a group or system) responsible for the accuracy, validity, and approval of the content.
In the era of Generative AI, I noticed a fundamental gap: a lack of basic principles that, if consistently followed, would dramatically improve documentation quality. What is often labeled as AI "hallucination" usually stems from poorly framed prompts or ambiguous context provided as training and validation material. Above all, documentation must remain clear and readable for humans—which today, unfortunately, is rarely the case. (Read more in first Substack article: Let's Make the World of Analysis and Specifications Great Again!)
The standard is designed to be universally applicable, regardless of your location, industry, or organization size. It consists of 10 foundational principles meant to unite anyone who wants to empower their team and elevate documentation quality in their daily work.
At a baseline, you can use it to audit your current workflow—see which principles you already fulfill and which ones have been overlooked. It serves as a great starting point for team discussions or formal policy adoption. Furthermore, it is tailored for modern workflows: the standard includes ready-to-use AI agent instructions so you can integrate it directly into automated drafting and validation pipelines.
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