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First developed by DHL and used with numerous other brands since, a Business Service Spec (BSS) is a concise set of ‘Fact Sheets’ (e.g. four to five A4 pages) that describe what the service does and key Non-Functional Requirements of the service, such as performance metrics.

In line with the 'Just Enough' principle, experience has shown that the Business Service Spec fulfils the Minimal Viable Documentation requirements of a service. It is used to capture the attributes of the service, regardless of its implementation (technical or non-technical) and regardless of the size (e.g. BPO service, an ERP SaaS or a Microservice).

Information Exchange Specs document any type of information (e.g. data, conversations, messages etc.) produced or consumed by the service.