Requirements of Google Docs Design

Requirements

Let us understand the functional and non-functional requirements for designing a collaborative editing service.

Functional requirements

This section will list down the activities a user will be able to perform using the collaborative document editing service:

• Document collaboration: Multiple users should be able to edit a document simultaneously. Also, a large number of users can view a document.
• Conflict resolution: The system should push the edits done by one user to all the other collaborators. Also, the system should resolve conflicts between users if they are editing the same portion of the document.
• Suggestions: User should get suggestions about completing frequently used words, phrases, keywords in a document, and fixing grammatical mistakes.
• View count: Editors of the document can also see the view count of the document.
• History: User should be able to see the history of collaboration on the document.

A real-world document editor has to have functions like document creation, deletion, and managing user access as well. We focus on the core functionalities listed above but we also discuss the possibility of other functionalities such as chatting between users in the lessons ahead.