Computer-aided Requirements Management

Product development teams practicing concurrent engineering are responsible for creating, disseminating, maintaining, and venfying requirements that span the full product life cycle, including manufacturing, reliability, maintainability, and environmental safety. This is a complex task that requires automated support; however, the state-of-the-art of computer-aided requirements management is relatively immature. This paper sets forth a broad set of concepts for requirements management automation, and illustrates their implementation in the Requirements Manager system developed under the DARPA Initiative in Concurrent Engineering. Requirements management automation will make possible a more structured product development process and, at the same time, a more effective intergration of humans and machines that reduces product development cost and cycle time while improving product quality.