Measuring the concretization level of Systems of Objectives in the early phase of product development to derive the product maturity

Abstract

In the early phase of product development, there is only limited knowledge regarding relevant objectives and requirements since knowledge carriers and a knowledge base must be first identified and established respectively. Due to continuously increasing knowledge about the system to be developed, objectives change rapidly which leads to a temporal dependency. Therefore, product developers are challenged with modeling objectives as conventional methods like specification sheets struggle to deal with these dynamics. Systems of Objectives allow to model objectives, requirements and boundary conditions along with their dependencies. From existing maturity models, correlations between Systems of Objectives and the degree of maturity of products can be derived. However, these models usually focus directly on validation objects like prototypes which are difficult and expensive to develop due to the dynamics in the early phases. Therefore, an approach for determining the concretization level of Systems of Objectives is useful to derive the product maturity level in the early phases. Through a literature review, standards governing the formulation of objectives and requirements as well as existing maturity models were analyzed. These were supplemented by a qualitative expert study and evaluated subsequently. Criteria for measuring the concretization level of Systems of Objectives were derived to develop a description model that allows relevant criteria to be categorized into three dimensions: Diversity, Level of Detail, and Validity. The assumptions for the proposed description model were validated in a study with 11 experts from research and industry. The description model allows the continuous measurement of the concretization level of the System of Objectives-providing early support for product developers.