Textual requirements are an essential thing during the entire life cycle of the product. They do not appear just at the beginning of the engineering process (as this is sometimes not properly illustrated in presentations). They are present at any level as stakeholder needs, system requirements, software requirements, hardware requirements, test requirements, regulatory requirements, standards requirements and so forth, the list can become very long. And these textual requirements can come from various different sources, including internal and external stakeholders such as customers, regulatory bodies and standards associations, internal sources such as product management, quality management, other engineering teams and so forth.

There is still in companies a lot of document based requirements management and collaboration processes in place where these requirements are still collected, authored and maintained in spreadsheets or Word docs. And when these requirement specifications shall go out to suppliers they are often turned into PDFs. It is certainly a way of working but this is a pretty complex and inefficient process. Textual requirements specifications undergo reviews between stakeholders and will change/evolve over time. This leads to many different revisions. Running a document based approach would lead to a very complex process where a large amount of document revisions need to be maintained, compared and merged for completion. In addition, requirements have always dependencies among each other and establishing a traceability for document based processes is difficult to establish and to maintain over time. Using a document based textual requirements process leads to a highly inefficient process which is very time consuming and error prone.

Instead of relying on documents it is much better to use a single source of truth concept like the requirements management & collaboration solution in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform with a real requirements data model behind that. This approach allows all stakeholders (internal & external) to work on the same requirements data without exchanging any documents at all. Information is updated in real-time and available to all stakeholders at any time from any place. The access to the data is defined through a security context to ensure the right stakeholders have access to the right data, so data protection is ensured. The requirements management solution in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform also supports the revision of each requirement object type such as specification, chapter and requirement. Customers are often asking me how to still get documents in and out, as they often need to deal with standards that are available as PDFs which need to be imported into 3DEXPERIENCE and they also want to generate documents as they have to share it for instance with assessment authorities and so forth. The good news: DS provides technologies to do this. The import of documents can be done with Reqtify and the export can be done with CATIA Report Generator.

Aside from this, looking at the large scope of requirements collaboration: each requirements data element also has a maturity attribute to support release processes when requirements specifications have to go through an approval process before they are released to teams for implementation. The requirements objects in 3DEXPERIENCE are also easily traceable among each other and this traceability can also be extended towards other domains to trace into software requirements and implementations or physical product structures.

I have attached a demo that I created for my customers to show them how you can use the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to collaborate on textual requirements specifications and how to deal with traceability between requirements. In this demo there is two stakeholders, Emilie an internal stakeholder and Tracy an external stakeholder from the supply chain who are running in this demo a review on the requirements specification without the exchange of any documents. Purely done in real-time on the same requirements specification.