Lessons Learned in How to Generate a Complete, Correct and Usable Set of Requirements the First Time and Every Time

From a quarter to one half of all projects that fail to meet their imperatives of cost, performance/quality or schedule are in some way associated with missing, poorly written or misunderstood requirements (1). This results in re-design, re-test and continual frustration to both the originator and the user of these requirements. Thus, a process for generating complete, consistent, unambiguous and verifiable requirements is essential to today’s automotive development process which focuses on “fast to market” and “doing it right the first time.”

Lessons learned from evaluating the customer, internal and supplier requirements specifications show that the following requirement deficiencies regularly occur –

• Hidden
• Incomplete or unclear
• Incorrect
• Ambiguous
• Missing
• Unknown
• Secret (competitive sensitive)
• Unknown Correlations.