Systems Engineering Glossary

Requirement Attributes.  Regardless of how it was generated, each requirement should have these requirement attributes: achievable (feasible); unique; traceable with respect to at least one higher-level requirement; not a combination of several requirements; complete; verifiable (testable); correct; unambiguous; understandable; design independent; consistent; and concise.

Requirements.  A requirement is a statement of a system service, attribute or constraint.

Requirements Allocation.  Based on functional and system analyses, system requirements must be allocated to lower-level components.

Requirements Analysis.  Requirements must be analysed to obtain a satisfactory understanding of the customer’s need and negotiated to establish an agreed set of consistent (unambiguous, correct, complete, etc) requirements.

Requirements Elicitation.  Requirements elicitation requires working with customers and users to understand the problem to be solved, the required performance of the system, constraints and so on.

Requirements Engineering.  The requirements engineering process is a set of activities intended to derive, validate and maintain a set of system requirements.

Requirements Management.  Requirements management is the process by which changes to requirements are managed throughout the system lifecycle.

Requirements Negotiation.  After they have been collected, requirements must be analysed to obtain a satisfactory understanding of the customer’s need and negotiated to establish an agreed set of consistent (unambiguous, correct, complete, etc) requirements.

Requirements Traceability.  Requirements traceability refers to the ability to identify and trace the relationships between requirements at different points in the design.

Requirements Validation.  Requirements must be validated to be complete, consistent and unambiguous to ensure that the requirements represent a complete appropriate description of the desired system.

Reusability.  Reusability refers to the ability to reuse a product (commonly a software product) in another project as anon-developmental item.

Reviews.  Technical reviews are vital part of the systems engineering process that provide the ability to determine that the design is meeting the necessary requirements.

Risk Management Plan (RMP).  A Risk Management Plan documents the risk management process as well as the findings of the risk identification, risk analysis and risk management activities.

Risk Management Tools.  Risk management tools assist in the process of risk management.

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