Holistic Requirements for Interdisciplinary Development Processes

Abstract

In modern systems, complexity rises stronger than the strength of discipline specific development methods. This leads to a gap in adequate engineering. Developers for e.g. mechatronic systems especially struggle with software intensive systems. Systems engineering offers certain methods to handle this complexity. Nevertheless, potential is still not fully used concerning requirements. Naturally, those determine the goals of the system to be developed and provide synergy effects within development processes. A closer look shows a lack of comprehension of requirements in the context of interdisciplinary system development and some clear challenges. Especially traditional engineering and software engineering can benefit from a common understanding of requirements. Therefore, an analysis of challenges is provided within this work. To tackle these, a systematic process is shown to integrate different levels into an interdisciplinary development process. This contribution discusses differences and synergy potentials from traditional and software engineering for technical requirements in an abstract and generic context. One possible solution is provided by the briefly described approach of the N3 matrix.