Topic‐based approach for contract‐based requirements development
Helmut Degen, Jochen G. Kaeppel, Sue Laventhiran · INCOSE International Symposium · 2012
Abstract Many large‐scale industrial projects have a signed contract with many thousand contract clauses which are the input for requirements work. The structure and content of many contracts do not meet IEEE Std 830 quality criteria. The content in the contract is often incomplete, redundant, contradictory and/or ambiguous. The effort to develop requirements from the contract can take several person years effort. It is not trivial to manage such an effort effectively and efficiently. This paper describes a topic based approach for planning and monitoring requirements work for a contract based project. The topic based approach was applied to a large scale industrial system with more than 16,000 contract clauses. However, the approach can also be applied to projects with a smaller number of contract clauses. The paper describes the challenges, the topic based approach itself and lessons learned.