Requirements Inheritance

[SpencerSkelly]

I am modeling a product line with a number of variant products.
These variants use a generalization relationship to the product line.
There are a LOT of requirements that apply to all of the variants of this product line, while each variant has a few specific to it.
Is there any way to make sure the requirements are inherited from the "abstracted product"?
I'd like to be able to show each product's requirements, including the inherited plus the product specific.
I thought this would be fairly straight-forward, but I just can't get it to show up...

[qwerty]

Simply spoken: this is not simple. Where ever I was involved, requirements were the most difficult part. Just prepare for a long struggle.

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[SpencerSkelly]

Thanks for the response.
I'm wondering if this difficulty came from the act of requirements management or the operation of the tool?
I'm now trying to tie the requirements to activities, which are then tied to functions, tied to solutions...
I am a novice, so while I grasp the concepts and basic use of the tool, I don't yet have the more advanced techniques down...
I'm happy to read and learn if someone knows where I can find this sort of information.

[qwerty]

RM is a complete business with lots of seminars, tools, service companies. You will likely need some consultant to help you if you don't have the knowledge. It's nothing you can learn over the weekend.

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[PeteC]

You can re-use requirements on multiple diagrams. You could produce one requirements package for common requirements (with one or multiple diagrams/sub-packages to manage them) and create requirement elements for the common requirements.

Then you could create one package (plus sub-packages as needed) and one or more requirements diagrams per variant and include on these both the common requirements (as links, so that there is only one actual element of the common requirements) and the variant requirements. If you need to export to Word to share then you can generate the documents to include the elements on the diagram and not just in the package. I would suggest using the Alias to help manage them (e.g. C1, C2 etc for the common requirements, V1-1, V1-2, V2-1 etc. for each variant - rather than V1, V2 etc. I would choose a few characters to help identify what the variant is, like the initials of it's name).

[SpencerSkelly]

Thanks Pete.
I like the idea of adding Common/Variant, as I'm currently working in Standard/Variant/Option concepts for architecture already.
I hadn't thought about actually identifying requirements this way, but I'll think about it as a way to manage regulatory requirements especially (my product has an absurd number of variance in requirements depending on the country it's sold in).
If this were one product, I'd be done.
I'm currently modeling multiple product lines that essentially fulfill a lot of the same functions into a "master model" and there is more to do at every turn.
What a cool exercise, though.
At this point I'm looking into using a matrix pulling from my architecture and requirements so I can manually copy the relationships from the "abstracted" element to the physical variant in the hope it can help keep things in order with the least amount of work.
After that, each physical product will inevitably have it's own "variant" requirements.

[SysEngr123]

What I've done in the past in other MBSE tools is utilize the "Satisfy" relationship to identify which configurations or components within those configurations are allocated which requirements.  Then you'll have a matrix of all of the requirements in rows, and columns identifying traceability of applicability of requirements.  I know you can do that in EA too, but not sure about the readability.  I like that approach because you only define your requirements once, then reuse them across your various configurations (YAY model element reuse!)

Other tools also have functions to create custom tables showing only requirements that a satisfied by a specific element, which provides great readability for each configuration.  I have yet to figure out how to do this in EA (I have done it in Cameo utilizing metachains and filters in the past)

[qwerty]

Try the relationship matrix. Alernative is to show diagams in tabular form. Both has pro and con. For me neither was really satisfying. YMMV

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