A concrete Return of Investment due to the Requirements Management Process Implementation Claudia Agostinelli, Francesco Inglima, Salvatore Zazzaro Rodolfo Mazzei, Sergio Di Ponzio EC Systems Engineering System Engineering / Vehicle Systems Integration ALTRAN S.p.A. HITACHI RAIL ITALY Naples, Italy Rome, Italy Copyright © held by the author Abstract— The application of the Systems Engineering 1. Preliminary assessment to outline current scenario: (SE) approach has become an increasingly necessary guide snapshot of the processes in use, definition of the for an efficient design of modern complex systems. needs and implementation of an action plan; However, experience has shown that without a sound 2. Formalization of the RM Process, developed strategy and structure, shared at company level, the according to the “V” model, progressively benefits promised by the SE approach can be reduced. The implemented within a specific RM tool (IBM Rational work described in this document aims to highlight a Doors 9.x, fully customized thanks to a set of tangible return of investment about how the definition and functionalities already developed by Altran); the implementation of a Requirement Management 3. Process implementation on a pilot project: application Process, developed by Altran S.p.A. and Hitachi Rail of the defined process within the developed Italy, has allowed to fully exploiting the promised benefits. framework to a pilot project in order to validate them. According to the users’ feedback, both the process and the framework were enhanced and updated; I. INTRODUCTION 4. Knowledge transfer: training and coaching of the The work described in the present paper is the result of a Client’s key people about RM process and tool; joint effort by Hitachi Rail Italy’s System Engineering team 5. RM environment release: this approach (process and and Altran, aimed at the implementation of a Requirement tools) have been applied to next Hitachi Rail Italy’s Management (RM) Process by means of a customized RM projects. environment, based on IBM Rational Doors tool. The RM Process aims to help users to better identify, A. Key Points of the Process control, verify, share and track requirements and changes that occur during entire project lifecycle according to INCOSE.  Centralized Database for the Requirement Management; II. CONTEXT & OBJECTIVES  Definition of Roles, Responsibilities and Activities; The purpose of the defined process is to guarantee the  Requirement Distribution (Allocation & Propagation); management of project requirements that make up the specification of a vehicle system and to realize a complete traceability of all the project steps across the entire life-cycle (from customer specifications down to system validation, through system design and development). To meet this goal, the process has been structured in steps to ensure that a common understanding of the requirements is established and maintained throughout the entire System life cycle. At the same time, the traceability will allow to observe the degree of coverage of the input requirements during the progress of the project. Fig. 1. Requirement Distribution (Allocation & Propagation) III. APPROACH & SOLUTION  Automatic Impact Analysis: A top level change is notified in real time to lower specification; In order to meet the identified objectives, the activity was divided in 5 progressive steps:  Key Performance Indicators (KPI): project’s evolution is monitored by dedicated metrics;  Management of the requirements verification and approach) took about 22 months to complete the overall validation in order to track how the technical qualification test phase before starting the revenue service. requirements are satisfied and verified. This consistent reduction of qualification phase time was mainly due to the lack of a consolidated system engineering B. The Requirement Management Framework approach and a not structured requirement management In order to allow all the users to benefit from an environment process (some critical requirement was better elicited with able to support them during the development phases, the IBM vehicle already delivered, with experimental test campaigns Doors tool has been strongly customized thanks to a series of which brought to significant retrofit activities). functionalities (previously developed by ALTRAN) that have been configured for the purpose. Compared with this reference project, the developed RM approach allowed to save the qualification and integration test The overall framework (IBM Doors 9.x + Altran libraries) fully time of more than 50%. implemented the RM Process, allowing the users also to automatize the manual, repetitive and boring operations, V. CONCLUSIONS increasing the effectiveness and the efficiency. The work described in the present paper has shown how the This framework can rapidly adopted by all the Clients who are developed RM framework has been used in a coherent way using or are intended to use IBM Doors. This framework is with the RM Process with consequent and evident benefits. flexible, modular and easy-to-use and allow the efficient reuse of requirements and specifications, a full traceability and Both the RM process and the framework are in continuous navigability of information, allowing the users to extract evolution. metrics and documents in automatic way. Currently, ALTRAN is supporting Hitachi Rail Italy to enhance the requirements quality, easing the writing and the IV. RESULTS & ADDED VALUE analysis of functional requirements according to the ISO29148. The proposed approach and the related RM Process have been The Requirements Quality is assured on the basis of defined developed and tuned on a specific HRI pilot project. rules, and patterns by means of the System Engineering Suite (developed and marketed by The Reuse Company). The developed process included the functional requirements traceability starting from customer requirements (Compliance Moreover, ALTRAN and Hitachi started working on future Matrix) through system requirements (SyRS) down to developments: functional and performance test specifications (FTS & PTS). 1. Product Family and variants management: from a source project it will be possible to instantiate one or more similar new target projects containing a subset of modules and requirements of the source one. It will be also possible to keep traceability among the source and target(s) in order to perform change impact analyses. Source project can be a generic application to be further developed and customized or a project to be cloned entirely. 2. Modelling and simulation of functional requirement: allow system architects to simulate requirements and to detect ambiguous, incorrect, missing, or conflicting requirements Fig. 2. Traceability (from customer specificatio down to FTS) before the design begins in order to spend less time redefining requirements and rewriting resulting in fewer This approach allowed to correctly manage the requirements development iterations needed to achieve quality results. verification and validation during the project development for engineering point of view and for the customer acceptance. REFERENCES The first pilot cars of this project was delivered on February 2017. The first cars (standard operational consist) started the [1] INCOSE, “Systems Engineering Handbook, A Guide For System Life revenue service on November of the same year. Cycle Processes And Activities”, Fourth edition, INCOSE-TP-2003- 002-04, 2015. The complete qualification test phase time was less than 9 [2] ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148 - Systems and software engineering — Life cycle months (the test sessions ended 2 weeks before the revenue processes — Requirements engineering. service start). A previous similar project of some year ago [3] ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 - Systems and software engineering - System life (taken as reference because not employed a robust SE cycle processes.