Design Article
Product How-To: Taking control of requirements specification for smart energy embedded systems
Anne-Francoise Pele
4/14/2012 9:16 AM EDT
Page 2
. Smart Energy Designline: Can you briefly explain the implementation methodology of Visure’s Requirements Engineering Lifecycle Solution, IRQA?
Visure Solutions: To manage collaboration between different departments, development teams need tools that define and enforce a common process and methodology. This foundation helps integrate a software team, which tends to implement an agile and iterative process with a hardware/mechanical team that typically opts for a classic waterfall approach. Working from a common platform, the teams are able to bring their disparate disciplines into a cohesive systems engineering process.
In truth, IRQA is process agnostic as it lets users define their own methodology whether agile, waterfall or ad hoc. The IRQA process graphically describes how the artifacts in the requirements lifecycle are structured, traced and derived from the highest to the lowest level of decomposition into hardware, software and mechanical requirements. These meta-models are interactive and describe the project’s structure, helping users navigate through the specification, restrict traceability and generate reports.
The process meta-model is complemented with a number of completely configurable capabilities such as workflows that help the roles carry out their corresponding tasks. The following process meta-model examples include:
• boxes that represent different types of elements like requirements and tests,
• filled in arrows that represent a hierarchy of types
• lines that represent the allowed traceability between them.
These diagrams clearly define and enforce the traceability policy, helping identify through validation matrices if there are isolated elements which have not been traced.
Figure 2: Example of a process metamodel in an agile project
Next: Page 3
. Smart Energy Designline: Can you briefly explain the implementation methodology of Visure’s Requirements Engineering Lifecycle Solution, IRQA?
Visure Solutions: To manage collaboration between different departments, development teams need tools that define and enforce a common process and methodology. This foundation helps integrate a software team, which tends to implement an agile and iterative process with a hardware/mechanical team that typically opts for a classic waterfall approach. Working from a common platform, the teams are able to bring their disparate disciplines into a cohesive systems engineering process.
In truth, IRQA is process agnostic as it lets users define their own methodology whether agile, waterfall or ad hoc. The IRQA process graphically describes how the artifacts in the requirements lifecycle are structured, traced and derived from the highest to the lowest level of decomposition into hardware, software and mechanical requirements. These meta-models are interactive and describe the project’s structure, helping users navigate through the specification, restrict traceability and generate reports.
The process meta-model is complemented with a number of completely configurable capabilities such as workflows that help the roles carry out their corresponding tasks. The following process meta-model examples include:
• boxes that represent different types of elements like requirements and tests,
• filled in arrows that represent a hierarchy of types
• lines that represent the allowed traceability between them.
These diagrams clearly define and enforce the traceability policy, helping identify through validation matrices if there are isolated elements which have not been traced.
Figure 1: Typical representation of the requirements V-lifecycle in Systems Engineering, including risk management
(Click on image to enlarge)
(Click on image to enlarge)
Figure 2: Example of a process metamodel in an agile project
These capabilities in IRQA help define and enforce the process, helping achieve certifications, as all the information relevant to requirements is centralized in one repository.
Next: Page 3
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