Requirements Engineering

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The Requirements Engineering section of the Engineering process is where we take our given customer requirements and draw them out into more tangible and useful design requirements. We use a variety of methods to improve the information we can get from our customer requirements. Namely, Pairwise analysis, technical performance measures and a house of quality (HoQ).

Pairwise Analysis
Although our Customer requirements are already ranked, it is still important to conduct pairwise analysis as the engineer, who has more background knowledge than the customers who decided upon the requirements. In this way we take responsibility for the shape of our design and add our own influence. Conducting the pairwise analysis showed that I agreed with the priority of customer requirements given by the survey, and therefore will keep them in the same order.

Technical Performance Measures
In this step we first need to extract a set of design requirements from our customer requirements, which is done in the table below: These Design Requirements are further refined into quantifiable, tangible Engineering Characteristics, as shown in the table below:

We have now drawn as much information out of the customer requirements as possible, now we will make use of that information to help establish our design using a House of Quality.

House of Quality (HoQ).
Below is the completed house of quality for the relevant design requirements. Click on the image for a much larger view. The house of quality did not give too much new information, it verified that we are able to achieve all of our design requirements if cost is not a factor, however you can see there is a large trade-off when cost is brought into the equation. (Negative correlations in the Roof of the house for the 'Price' Beam).

Having completed these steps, we move on to the System Functions step of the engineering process.