A Template for Technical Design Documents to Help Distributed Software Development Teams Collaborate Better

Technical Design Documents (TDD) are commonly adopted documents in the software development industry that describe the technical solution implementation design. These documents are informal and lack strict requirements regarding their content. The structure often differs from organization to organization. Lack of standardized structure often results in low-quality design documents that can hinder successful technical solution implementation. In this paper, we applied a grounded theory method to analyze various organization-specific TDD structures and proposed a standardized structure for this document. In addition to the plain text structure, we visualized it in the form of a mindmap to facilitate the adoption of this template. Organizations can use the proposed TDD template structure as a basis for the company-specific structure of TDD and may include all or part of the sections proposed.