Managing requirement structures

A requirement specification is a container for individual requirements. These items can be structured in a hierarchy of parent, child, and sibling relationships.

You can build a requirement specification structure in several ways:

• Build the structure manually by creating the structure items one at a time. First, you create a requirement specification as the peak item, and then you add the structure elements by creating requirements at lower levels.
• Import the structure from Microsoft Office Word to create all structure items simultaneously. Systems Engineering automatically generates a new requirement specification, complete with a hierarchy of parent, child, and sibling items. The items can be either requirements or paragraphs, depending on the subtype you select.
• Copy an existing object as a template for creating requirement specifications, requirements, and paragraphs in a structure.

You can create a requirement structure by copying an existing requirement structure with the same composition. For example, create the requirements for a new car by copying the requirements for the outgoing model. This process is sometimes called creating a deep copy.

Once created, you can maintain the structure by moving requirements up or down, or by promoting and demoting them. Moving a requirement up or down changes its position under its parent requirement; promoting or demoting a requirement moves it to another, higher or lower, parent.

You can send the requirements structure to the Relation Browser to view and expand the hierarchy of requirements.

Related Topics

• Relation Browser layout options