The RDD.COM Product Family

Managing and Engineering Requirements

September 2000
RDD.COM Allows Teams to Visualize Information Graphically

To support the needs of all stakeholders throughout the lifecycle, agile teams need to be able to capture requirement attributes, linkages, and history. Requirements need traceability to their sources, other requirements, architectural (logical and physical) candidates, as well as issues, decisions, and other process-specific information such as comments or remarks.

RDD.COM allows teams to capture and efficiently distribute data about the system(s). It makes it easy to understand traceability that exists for the system. With RDD.COM, teams can develop, prioritize, and analyze user and system requirements that are appropriate to the lifecycle stage.

Describing the System

To adequately describe a system and its refined requirements, teams need to capture information about user requirements and their sources, equipment options, and decisions. To enable lifecycle capability management, a team needs stakeholders' inputs throughout the lifecycle. Data produced by stakeholders evolves; it needs to be captured, controlled, and managed. Engineers and managers need tools that will help them elicit and understand needs of operational users. They also need tools that allow them to precisely and unambiguously define the characteristics for each layer in an evolving architecture.

With RDD.COM, collaborating teams can capture and maintain data necessary for the system. Teams can inter-relate all data needed to trace the history and heritage of a user's requirement from initial needs through implementation, verification and through the operational phase.

Capability managers can use RDD.COM to evaluate evolving user requirements against a baselined set of user and system requirements and functionality. RDD.COM enables a manager to evaluate different alternative system builds. The manager can use this knowledge to help understand and plan for long-term management and evolution of the operational capabilities.

Baseline Management of Systems Engineering

Baseline Management

The RDD.COM Enhances Team Communication and Supports Collaboration.

RDD.COM allows a collaborating team to look at the required system behavior through its integrated behavioral analysis capability. With RDD.COM, the agile team defines modeling goals and objectives and level of detail required. RDD.COM provides teams with enabling technology that allows them to consider alternatives, identify risks, and develop and extract requirements that are unique, concise, and unambiguous.

Using RDD.COM, teams can model systems from the viewpoint of objects to better understand its context and define the characteristics of its external interfaces. Behavior models allow the team to:

1. Integrate the concepts of system scenarios (identified critical threads) · Understand the behavior (both static and dynamic) ·
2. Define information flows (data and non-data) · Establish functional sequencing (serial or parallel activities)
3. Identify and define the concurrency and its type (constrained or unconstrained)
4. Determine nominal behavior, and
5. Assess failure modes and their effects

Well-established or existing parts of the system can be modeled at a high level; and a novel or risky part can be modeled to a much greater level of detail to enable a better understanding and help reduce risk.

Teams can use RDD.COM to help understand and define Measures of Effectiveness (MOE). the MOEs can either be defined as attributes or through linkages to all behavior and associated requirements. Constraints of the system can be identified, analyzed, and quantified through the robust description of the system behavior and related resource constraints.

RDD.COM provides engineers and managers with an integrated set of graphical representations to show control logic (functional flow), data flow, data content, concurrency, resource usage, layers of recovery, and reliability.

The effect of changes in system behavior on the alternatives and their costs can be analyzed with cost analysis tools interfacing with RDD.COM. The impact of changes on resources and other associated constraining factors can be modeled and analyzed through RDD.COM's optional discrete event simulation capability Results of impact analyses can be distributed as information products to support specific process reviews. RDD.COM supports the documentation definition, development and output needs of a team through several options that include a robust, programmable query and template building engine, a public API, and on-line, printable graphical hierarchies.

Baseline Management of Systems Engineering