Identification of a reusable requirements structure for embedded products in a dynamic market environment

Abstract

A technical product can have hundreds of requirements, resulting in a resource consuming requirement processes. Requirements are therefore becoming a valuable knowledge. Requirement reuse has been recognized as a promising enabler to increase efficiency and quality of the requirement processes. Before documenting and reusing requirements there must be a defined way of organizing them. An efficient comprehension of the context of the requirement structure will support the usage of the structure and thus reuse of existing requirements. To understand what makes a structure qualified for requirement reuse; criterions for a good requirement structure were identified. A survey of current requirement structuring techniques revealed that the current methods only fulfil some but not all of the criterions. A proposal of a structure for a reusable requirement specification has been presented. It suggests a new way of grouping requirements and also utilizes techniques presented in some of the existing modelling methods. The proposal was applied to a product development project of Solar Inverters. The case study revealed that the proposed structure was well accepted by its users, remained stable between projects and supported reuse.