Requirements of Google Docs’ Design

Requirements

Let’s look at the functional and non-functional requirements for designing a collaborative editing service.

Functional requirements

The activities a user will be able to perform using our collaborative document editing service are listed below:

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

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