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In this article we’ll explore the topic of requirements, and attitudes about identifying requirements before the design work begins.
In my experience, I’ve had design resources literally state “I hope there are no requirements”. (Unconstrained design and no requirements certainly made this designer’s job much easier.)
There are several other reasons requirements are sometimes neglected:
Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is an excellent tool to ensure linkage of customer needs to product requirements. This article will provide a high-level overview on creating a ‘first-level’ QFD and how it can be used to guide design optimization.
(There are many additional features of QFD , however, and readers of this article are encouraged to research the methodology further.)
As stated above, we use the QFD matrix (similar to a cause-effect matrix) to ensure linkage of customer needs to product requirements using the critical thinking / questions as follows: [Read more…]
