Requirement Engineering is essential for developing complex products. You will gain a general overview of the product, by following the entire development continuously during each single stage. This approach accomplishes Model-Based System Engineering and quality certifications such as ISO 26262 and CMMI greatly.
Requirements collection is the most important and awkward activity for a new product concept, as a strong collaboration is required among several different technical teams. The Stakeholders definition follows, that is, to select a group of persons able to influencing an activity by its conduct. Among possible profiles arising in the product concept, the followings are always present:
- all persons interested on the new product/system creation;
- the Customer and the final users: persons knowing deeply what the product/system will be used for, but without an appropriate technical knowledge concerning single technical aspects and sub-components;
- technical personnel and developers: persons having a deep expertise in their specific competence field, but without a global overview. They do not know what the impact is of their work on the work of colleagues operating in different fields.
The organic and structured handling of design requirements allows to avoid misunderstanding or lack of communication among different design teams. Time losses and implementation costs decreases. Meta-languages such as SysML and UML are helpful in this sense. They create a unique development environment understandable to all teams, no matter which their technical competence is. In addition, they avoid misunderstanding due to natural language usage.