Requirements Management for Safety Critical Systems

A Requirement is a statement that identifies a product or operational, functional, or design characteristic or constraint, which is unambiguous, testable, or measurable and necessary for product or process acceptability. [3] Requirements Engineering is the branch of systems engineering which address the process of identifying and then monitoring the stakeholders needs and systems required functionalities. In this framework, Requirements Management is about organising these information in a form that will support the system implementation. In particular, it ensures the preservation of the information integrity during the whole system life-cycle, with respect to changes in the system and its environment. [19] Requirements play a key role during the whole system development life-cycle, but since a typical medium-sized systems development project may yield some 2500 distinct statements of requirements, a number of Requirements Management tools (i.e: IBM DOORS) is available to support the product development and automate process. Why is Requirements Management so important in the context of a structured organization which aims to deliver complex/safety critical systems? Requirements Management offer to any project contractor the possibility to incrementally evaluate the efficiency of the system solution, by tracking its progress from the earliest phases (Concept Design) of a project, to System Testing, Validation and Operation.