Fan Tutorial 1 - Specify Product - Part 2

This is the Continuation of the Fan tutorial - Specify Product - part 1 where we cover the topics of the common flows such as “Review and Improve Requirements” and “Approve and Release Specifications”. In this part, we cover, how you can update or manage requirements, create discussions, reviews and analysis blocks of requirements and share them.

This part would take around 15-25 mins.

(4) Update, Manage and Review Requirements

Throughout the development process, it's common for requirements to evolve and be updated based on various factors, such as stakeholder input and design constraints. In Valispace, you can directly update requirements by double-clicking on the column fields or within the details section of the requirement, and all changes are recorded in the History for easy reference. Note that any change increases the requirement by one or more minor versions (please check Version and Releases for more information).

Collaboration and reviews are crucial to ensure the requirements are thoroughly discussed and evaluated. Valispace offers powerful features like discussions, Tasks, and the review center to facilitate these crucial steps.

In the following steps, we will demonstrate how you can effectively utilize discussions to engage in meaningful conversations with your groups or colleagues, fostering collaboration and ensuring the best possible outcome for your project.

Creating Discussions on a requirement

To create a discussion on the requirement R-Fan-002, follow these steps:

• Click on the Actions columns, hover over to + Add, and select :discussion: Discussion.

• Upon clicking the icon, a dialogue box opens. Here, type @, and you will have the list of users in the dropdown. Select any user and copy and paste the following question: Is it feasible to have propellers for 50g, or do we need more mass allocation?

• Click on Add and then Close.

The steps to raise a discussion are illustrated in the tutorial below.

Creating a new discussion

Once you tag your colleague(s) using “@” and post a discussion, the user will receive a notification under the icon , where they can access the discussion(s) and write comments to follow up.

Apart from Discussions, Valispace offers a dedicated feature for Reviews, giving the involved Stakeholders a place to go through a formal Review. This feature is not covered in this Tutorial but feel free to explore the Review Center.

(5) Validating Requirements

In the early stages of the product lifecycle, it is crucial to validate Requirements before moving forward with the design process. Valispace provides a convenient way to manage Requirement states using the “State” column. By default, Valispace includes states like Draft, In Review, and Final, but users can add additional states based on their specific needs.

The following steps will show you how to assign the "Draft" state to newly added requirements, ensuring a structured and organized workflow.

Navigate over to the Fan_Specs

• On the side, click Columns (1) in the right corner and tick State(2) if it is not selected. This action enables or disables the state column in your Requirements table (see Figure Enable State Column).

• Tick the small rectangular box on the top left of the Identifier column. This selects all the requirements within the specification.

• Now, hover over to the state column and double-click on the first cell of the R-Fan-001 state column. This will open a drop-down with the “State” options list.

• Select Draft and click Yes on the confirmation dialogue box. This bulk edit adds the “Draft” state to all the Requirements.

These steps are illustrated in the click-through below.

Adding the “State” Attribute information

You can also create an automatic transition of states from “Final” to “Draft” or “In Review”, whenever there is an edit to the requirement’s Identifier, Title or Text field. You can find more information in this article.

(6) Create an Analysis/documentation within Valispace 

As an engineer, you might have to create an Analysis to leverage your engineering data and document the properties of your design. You can use our inbuilt Analyses module for this.

Add a descriptive Analysis.

• Go to the Analyses Module (see Figure Accessing the Analysis Module) by clicking the Analyses button (1) in the left sidebar.

• Create a new analysis by clicking on + Documents(2).

• In the Create document dialogue box (see Figure Creating a Project Summary), name the analysis as Project_Summary(1) and click Create(2).

• The analysis consists of blocks, which can be texts, images, videos, charts, or tables. Click inside the existing block 1. Write heading... and type  Introduction

• Click on the second text block and copy and paste the following sentence into it:

“The ValiFan is designed in a way that it works with less power than conventional Fans.”

• Once completed, you can click outside of the block to save the content (see Figure Adding Information to the Document).

• The users can click on Click to add new block to add additional blocks that can be of different types (text, images, tables or charts). This will be explored in the next steps.

PowerUserTip: click + Folder in the left navigation pane to create a Folder to organize your Reports.

Creating a Table of Requirements - Stakeholder specifications

You can create a table of requirements from the stakeholder specifications. To create a table:

• Select the Click to add new block

• Select the option Tables on the popup dialogue box. Here, choose Requirements.

Now, Valispace creates a table with all the project’s requirements. Also, you can select the list of columns you would like to have in the tables. Since our aim is to show only the Requirements from the “stakeholder_requirements” Specification, you can use the filter option for the specification. This is demonstrated in the following tutorial.

Adding “stakeholders_requirements” to our analysis

Sharing the Analysis Module

You can share the created Analysis with your colleagues or stakeholders through the option “Share”. To do that:

• Click on the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner

• Select the option Share from the dropdown menu

• Select any user from the drop-down and click on Create new link(1). This creates a new link which you can copy and share with your colleagues or stakeholders(2).

Check out Figure Creating a Link to see how this is done.

The shared Analysis is a Web View of the document that is created in Valispace and stays up to date with the latest changes.

The Web View can be accessed by anybody without the need for a Valispace licence. This ensures information exchange with Stakeholders that might not have direct access to Valispace.

Next Steps?

Congratulations! You now know how to specify a product in Valispace.

Look at our Fan Tutorial 2 to learn how to create a System structure of your Desktop fan with the “System Design Module”.