Requirements driven development from contract win to customer sign-off

Abstract

The ultimate objective of system development is the successful transformation of the system requirements into a verified design that performs its intended function in its specified environments. As highly complex system of systems designs become more prevalent, traditional "waterfall" development models that utilize document-centric V-diagram based development processes have been found to result in frequent project cost overruns and reduced quality, thereby increasing the risk of serious mission and safety critical field failures in the deployed end product. The development of model based design methodologies and supporting design tools is helping to manage system engineering complexity by enabling engineers to better understand requirements, develop candidate solution architectures and verify design decisions early in the development process. As model driven development related design and test artifacts proliferate throughout the design process, more formal methods and automated tools for tracing requirements are needed to ensure the system requirements are fully implemented and verified. ©2010 IEEE.