Requirements Breakdown Process

When you have a set of high-level requirements of a system, it is better to break them down into lower-level requirements or sub-system requirements. This section explains how you can easily break down requirements, create connections, and track these requirements in Valispace.

Take, for example, requirement C - 0001 of the Customer_specification from the Valicopter-5000 project which states that the “The Valicopter transports 4 passengers within 15 minutes between two places within a city that are 10km apart at a cost of $50 per passenger”. Requirements VC - 0001, OPS-0001, and 0PS -0002 are child requirements that are broken down further where the requirement comes under product specification and operational specification. The requirement also has a parent from the Risk_Register Specification in the form of R-0018. This relationship can be viewed in the "Connections" tab when going into the details of the C-0001 Requirement and navigating to “Connections“ (see Figure Connections).

Connections - The Connections Graph can be viewed for a selected Requirement, for a whole Specification or for all Requirements at once.

Adding Children/Parents relationships to Requirements

To add any Parent-Child Relationship enable the “Parents“ and “Children“ columns by navigating to the “Columns“ tab on the right.

In case you have already created the child requirements, you can simply connect them to the parent requirement by adding them in the children column of the parent requirement. If the user adds any requirement as parent or children, the corresponding relationship is created automatically. In the drop-down menu, it is possible to add multiple requirements (see Figure Creating Inheritance)

Creating Inheritance - To create Parent-Child Relationships enable the “Parents“ and “Children“ column and double click into the cells to select Requirements from a dropdown.

If you are on the verge of breaking down the parent requirement and would like to add multiple requirements, please follwo these steps:

Select the parent requirement
Click on the Identifier to go into the “Details” section of the Requirement
On the details menu, select “Children”. Here you can add the child requirements by clicking “+” and following a similar procedure for adding the requirements
Note that when you create the child requirement inside the parent, the parent columns are automatically updated by Valispace in the respective requirements.

Adding Children in Details Section of Requirement