Requirements Development for the NASA Advanced Engineering Environment (AEE)

The requirements development process for the Advanced Engineering Environment (AEE) is presented. This environment has been developed to allow NASA to perform independent analysis and design of space transportation architectures and technologies. Given the highly collaborative and distributed nature of AEE, a variety of organizations are involved in the development, operations and management of the system. Furthermore, there are additional organizations involved representing external customers and stakeholders. Thorough coordination and effective communication is essential to translate desired expectations of the system into requirements. Functional, verifiable requirements for this (and indeed any) system are necessary to fulfill several roles. Requirements serve as a contractual tool, configuration management tool, and as an engineering tool, sometimes simultaneously. The role of requirements as an engineering tool is particularly impo rtant because a stable set of requirements for a system provides a common framework of system scope and characterization among team members. Furthermore, the requirements form the basis for system verification. The AEE Project has undertaken a thorough p rocess to translate the desires and expectations of external customers and stakeholders into functional system -level requirements that are capture d with sufficient rigor to optimize development pl anning, resource allocation, sy stem -level design implementat ion and verification. These requirements are maintained in an integrated, relational database that provides traceability back up to originating customer and stakeholder expectations and down to verification methods .