15 February 2019: Roman Wenig

There are numerous urban legends telling about a product idea sketched on a napkin or a beer mat from where it had started its road to success until the product went into production and finally reached its customers.

This road, however, looks considerably less glorious for most products. It all starts with the stakeholders, i.e. the parties interested in the product to be developed or in the associated lifecycle, see also ISO 10006:2017-11 “Quality management – Guidelines for quality management in projects”.

These stakeholders put demands on the products and services. These demands also include quality management system requirements as defined by international standards, respectively in chapter 8.3 “Design and development of products and services” of

• ISO 9001:2015 and
• IATF 16949:2016.

In general, there are two different categories of requirements – the functions a product has to fulfil and a broad range of “-ilities”, i.e. aspects that are not part of any function but also play an important role. Some well-known examples are reliability, availability and maintainability.

Now we have reached a point where the whole issue becomes confusing. No one ever juggles several lists and bears in mind how the elements of both lists relate to one another. We need some software helping us keep track of all the requirements...