A Taxonomy for Design Requirements from Corporate Customers

Development of a systematic classification and taxonomy of collaborative design activities

“…Thus, taxonomy is a study of arrangements. The roles of taxonomies include the transmission of information (Jeffrey 1982), rapid recall of information and property predication (Dunn and Everitt 1982), clarification of information (Derr 1973), and the organisation of large bodies of information (Gershenson and Stauffer 1999).…”

“…While some research efforts have been made to organise particular issues in collaborative design, such as the classification of conflicts (Klein 2000), a thorough organisation of issues in collaborative design does not appear to exist in the literature. Taxonomies have also been applied in general engineering design research, such as for engineering decision support systems (Ullman and D'Ambrosio 1995), mechanical design problems (Dixon et al 1988), idea generation methods (Shah 1998), and design requirements (Gershenson and Stauffer 1999).…”

“…These metrics were used in an iterative manner, providing guidance for restructuring, redefining, expanding, and constraining the taxonomy during development. The four metrics are derived from the work on taxonomy development as argued by Derr (1973) and Gershenson and Stauffer (1999): (A) orthogonality -ensures that there is no overlap between taxons, (B) spanning -breadth of the taxonomy seeks to cover as much as possible, (C) precision -depth of the taxonomy seeks to go into detail, and (D) usability -ensures the greatest possible ease of communication between researchers.…”

“…It is argued that a taxonomy be exhaustive in coverage of a selected domain (Derr 1973). Others suggest that it is impossible to classify an entire domain (Gershenson and Stauffer 1999). Rather, one attempts to classify one's understanding of the domain.…”

A Systematic Approach for the Specification of Customer Requirements

“…Regardless of the importance of the requirement specification, this has not been well investigated in the literature [1][2][3][4][5]. Two major challenges have complicated this problem: first, the information included in customer requirements is too broad and diversified to be put into a well defined structure; secondly, the customer requirements are usually vaguely described so that their modeling has been taken as extremely difficult, if not impossible [6,7].…”