Designing a product

Designing a product is comprised of three main activities:

• Gathering and communicating the requirements
• Analyzing the requirements and synthesizing solutions
• Creating successively more precise definitions of the product functional, logical, and physical decompositions

These activities overlap, and an iteration of one activity probably affects the other.

Your starting point may depend on whether you are designing a new system or developing an existing one.

Projects that inadequately communicate requirements to developers are prone to run over budget and behind schedule, with late-cycle changes and extensive integration efforts. In turn, these conditions can lead to functional deviations and inferior quality, and ultimately to a product that the customer may reject.