REQUIREMENTS CHECKLISTS: BENCHMARKING THE COMPREHENSIVENESS OF THE DESIGN SPECIFICATION
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Gaetano Cascini, Marco Cantamessa, Dorian Marjanovic, Frederico Rotini
Author: Becattini, Niccolo; Cascini, Gaetano; Rotini, Federico
Series: ICED
Institution: 1: Politecnico di Milano, Italy; 2: Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
Section: Design Methods and Tools - part 1
Page(s): 041-050
ISBN: 978-1-904670-68-1
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
It is commonly recognized that the definition of product requirements is an essential step of any design process. Many techniques have been proposed for building a suitable design specification, i.e. for defining a set of requirements characterized by validity, completeness, operationality, non-redundancy, conciseness and practicability. Among them, several methods and tools primarily aim at populating the design specification: some of them focus on very specific objectives but are applicable in many different domains (e.g., Design for X). Others are domain specific, but try to cover the entire scope of the specification (e.g., checklists and standards). This paper describes an abstract-level checklist for requirements definition, suitable for any field of application, aiming at producing exhaustive lists of requirements. A previous experimental application with Mechanical Engineering students clearly showed that the proposed multi-purpose checklist allows populating design specifications more complete than those defined without any support. This paper follows up demonstrating the capability of the novel checklist against the checklist for conceptual design by Pahl and Beitz.
Keywords: Requirements, Design Methods, Design Education, Design Specification, Requirements Checklists