The derivation of design requirements from stakeholder needs

• Main Author: Agouridas, Vassilis
• Published: University of Leeds 2003
• Subjects: 338.762
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.401278

Globalisation of competition and the demand to deliver increasing stakeholder value has dramatically influenced the operation of engineering enterprises over the last decade. Enterprises have universally recognised the effectiveness of the design process as a critical success factor for accomplishing their aims, because it enables them to deliver products of requisite quality consistently. The design process can be described by four design domains. These are the customer, functional, physical, and process domains. Design involves mapping between these domains. A number of tools exist to support these mappings. However, they are applicable only to the mappings between the functional, physical, and process domains. For example, the derivation of design requirements (functional domain) that are based on the design parameters of a product (physical domain) can be supported; existing tools do not address the derivation of design requirements (functional domain) that are the outcome of mapping from stakeholder needs (customer domain). This thesis proposes a systematic approach for deriving design requirements from stakeholder needs. The approach includes a representation scheme that allows for a detailed analysis of stakeholder requirements. For example, a stakeholder requirement can be expressed as a stakeholder need or as a stakeholder attribute. It also includes a process that enables the systematic derivation of design requirements from stakeholder needs. For example, stakeholder needs are mapped to stakeholder attributes and vice versa; and stakeholder attributes (SAs) are distilled based on their similarities into single statements of SAs (referred to as distilled SAs). Design requirements that correspond to the distilled SAs are then derived. The approach has been, implemented in a leading and widely-used commercial requirements management software application; namely, Telelogic-DOORS. An evaluation of the approach to support a product development team during the derivation of design requirements for a new product was carried out.