Understanding the technical content of requirements in specification document

Designing a good specification is essential as it contributes to a better overall design. A good design is possible if design problems are clearly defined, which in practice these problems are described in a specification. Thus, support to assist design engineers, during the specification development process, is essential to be devised in advance. To achieve this aim, understanding how to formulate a good requirement is necessary and it is only possible if design engineers understand the technical content of a requirement. In aiming to understand the technical content of a requirement in practice, 97 statements from 2 specification documents were analyzed in detail and the results are reported in this paper. These statements were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively based on a pre-defined coding scheme. The results of the study show that the majority of requirements were related to the characteristic attributes of the products. The study also found that the solution requirement was a part of the requirements in a specification document. Meanwhile, the issue and class of the requirement are related to each other and several classes of requirement are always required to address a single issue. Furthermore, design engineer needs to consider several related issues in order to formulate a requirement statement.