Finding the most suitable requirement management tool for product development
Kleemola, Jaakko (2024)
Kleemola, Jaakko
2024
Konetekniikan DI-ohjelma - Master's Programme in Mechanical Engineering
Tekniikan ja luonnontieteiden tiedekunta - Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2024-09-27
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202409178755
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202409178755
Tiivistelmä
As product development is getting increasingly complex and demanding, products are getting more customer-specific, and the number of people involved in development is increasing, companies must find new ways to handle the complexities and improve their practices. One of the significant practices is managing the requirements of the system to be developed. Requirements create a basis for the system development and they must be managed throughout the entire development process.
In this thesis work, requirement management in product development is studied as a part of systems engineering process. The objective for the theoretical study is to form a comprehensive overview of the requirement management, its phases and practices, and the dependencies to other processes and practices in systems engineering frame of reference. The objective for the empirical study is to find out the case company’s requirements for the requirement management tool. The requirements are then utilized for evaluation and comparison of different requirement management tools to determine the most suitable tool for the company.
The requirement management can be divided into two subprocesses, requirements development and requirements maintenance. The requirements development is a process of defining and refining the requirements for the system to be developed. It includes the phases of defining the business objectives, stakeholders and interfaces for the system, eliciting, analyzing, specifying and classifying the requirements for the system, and verifying and validating the system against the requirements. The requirements development has a close relationship to the system modelling, as the functional, logical and physical models are created iteratively with the requirements. The requirements maintenance is set of practices to keep the requirements information up to date. The most important practices are maintaining the traceability of requirements and managing the changes occurring during the system development process. Nowadays as the number of requirements in system development can become very high, reusing the requirements from former development projects can save a lot of resources.
The contribution of the theoretical study are the things that must be considered in the empirical study, and the requirements development process, which is utilized in defining the case company’s requirements for the requirement management tool. The requirements for the tool are defined based on information collected in the company through interviews and examining company documentation. The requirements are specified and classified to following categories: usability and performance, requirement structure, traceability and change management, user rights, integration into the tool chain, reuse of requirements, and other features and functions. The requirements are then derived into evaluation and comparison criteria. The criteria are used to evaluate and compare the three preselected requirement management tools. The tools are evaluated individually, and then compared to each other to find out the strengths and limitations of each tool and determine the most suitable tool for the company.
The requirement management is a complex entity, especially when combined with a platform-based modular product development. Regardless of which tool the company decides to use, it requires effort and dedication from the organization to successfully implement the requirement management.
In this thesis work, requirement management in product development is studied as a part of systems engineering process. The objective for the theoretical study is to form a comprehensive overview of the requirement management, its phases and practices, and the dependencies to other processes and practices in systems engineering frame of reference. The objective for the empirical study is to find out the case company’s requirements for the requirement management tool. The requirements are then utilized for evaluation and comparison of different requirement management tools to determine the most suitable tool for the company.
The requirement management can be divided into two subprocesses, requirements development and requirements maintenance. The requirements development is a process of defining and refining the requirements for the system to be developed. It includes the phases of defining the business objectives, stakeholders and interfaces for the system, eliciting, analyzing, specifying and classifying the requirements for the system, and verifying and validating the system against the requirements. The requirements development has a close relationship to the system modelling, as the functional, logical and physical models are created iteratively with the requirements. The requirements maintenance is set of practices to keep the requirements information up to date. The most important practices are maintaining the traceability of requirements and managing the changes occurring during the system development process. Nowadays as the number of requirements in system development can become very high, reusing the requirements from former development projects can save a lot of resources.
The contribution of the theoretical study are the things that must be considered in the empirical study, and the requirements development process, which is utilized in defining the case company’s requirements for the requirement management tool. The requirements for the tool are defined based on information collected in the company through interviews and examining company documentation. The requirements are specified and classified to following categories: usability and performance, requirement structure, traceability and change management, user rights, integration into the tool chain, reuse of requirements, and other features and functions. The requirements are then derived into evaluation and comparison criteria. The criteria are used to evaluate and compare the three preselected requirement management tools. The tools are evaluated individually, and then compared to each other to find out the strengths and limitations of each tool and determine the most suitable tool for the company.
The requirement management is a complex entity, especially when combined with a platform-based modular product development. Regardless of which tool the company decides to use, it requires effort and dedication from the organization to successfully implement the requirement management.