Movie Finder — System Requirements¶

Functional Requirements¶

User-Facing Discovery¶

The system shall accept a natural language description of a movie from a user. The description may include any combination of partial title, plot summary, cast members, director, genre, release period, or mood.

The system shall return a ranked list of candidate movies matching the user's description. Each candidate shall include sufficient metadata for the user to recognise the intended film, including title, year, director, rating, plot summary, poster image, and cast.

When the returned candidates do not match the user's intent, the system shall accept a clarification or correction and produce a revised set of candidates.

The system shall limit the number of refinement cycles per session to a configurable maximum. After the maximum is reached without a confirmed match, the system shall respond with an appropriate end-of-search message.

Movie Confirmation¶

The system shall ask the user to explicitly confirm which candidate is the intended film before advancing to the Q&A phase. The system shall not enter Q&A mode without an explicit confirmation from the user.

Contextual Q&A¶

After confirmation, the system shall accept open-ended follow-up questions about the confirmed film and provide accurate, detailed answers scoped to that film.

The Q&A capability shall have access to real-time metadata retrieval tools to answer questions that may not be in the pre-indexed corpus.

Streaming Responses¶

The system shall stream AI-generated responses to the client progressively, so that partial results appear as they are generated rather than after the full response is complete.

Authentication¶

The system shall require users to register with an email address and password. Registered users shall authenticate to obtain time-limited access credentials. The system shall support credential renewal without requiring re-login within the renewal window.

Session Persistence¶

The system shall persist conversation history so that users can return to a previous session and continue where they left off. Users shall be able to list their sessions, view the full history of any session, and delete sessions they no longer need.

Multi-Tenancy Isolation¶

Each user shall have access only to their own sessions and history. The system shall enforce ownership boundaries on all session read and delete operations.

Non-Functional Requirements¶

Response Latency¶

The first streamed response token shall be delivered to the user within an acceptable time after a message is submitted, under normal operating conditions.

Availability¶

The system shall be designed for continuous availability. Individual component failures shall not result in total system unavailability.

Scalability¶

The system shall support horizontal scaling of the API tier to handle increased concurrent users without architectural changes.

Security¶

User credentials shall be stored using a one-way hashing scheme. Session tokens shall be short-lived and renewable. All API keys and signing secrets shall be stored in a dedicated secrets management service and never embedded in application code, container images, or CI/CD logs.

Observability¶

The system shall provide structured logging at the application level. The AI pipeline shall support optional execution tracing for debugging and evaluation purposes.

Developer Productivity¶

All quality gates — linting, type checking, and automated testing — shall be executable with a single command per service. No host-side language runtime installation shall be required beyond a container runtime.

Data Consistency¶

The embedding representation used to index the movie corpus shall be identical to the representation used at query time. A change to the embedding model shall require a full re-index of the corpus before deployment.