RE-ENGINEER THE REQUIREMENTS PROCESS

摘要

IDEAS OF INNOVATION AND IMPROVEMENT in modern shipbuilding often bring to mind compelling images of robotic welding machines, virtual reality digital twins, and other digital transformation initiatives. Requirements engineering does not sound as exciting as other innovation opportunities, but it may be unparalleled in its potential to enhance every point in the downstream value chain, from functional engineering through to supply chain, to in-service support. At the company that I work with, Seaspan Shipyards, part of our focus is to re-engineer our requirements management processes and associated tools. The aim: to reduce the administrative burden of data entry, simplify change mechanisms, improve requirement quality, and provide our engineers with an appropriately broad solution space. Our purpose here will be to examine how we re-engineered our requirements process and the corresponding lifecycle of each requirement, and how we applied it to a real-world project-the design and build of the Canadian Coast Guard's multi-purpose vessel (MPV). We'll see how these process and lifecycle updates result in a simpler yet more powerful requirements management database (RMDB). Finally, we'll show how adherence to a syntax pattern improved the quality of individual requirements and simplified requirements reviews.