The Case Study: Organizing the HOLIS Requirements

In Chapter 7, we performed some systems engineering on HOLIS, our home lighting automation system. At this point, we still don't know very much about HOLIS, but we probably know enough to establish a first cut at the organization for our requirements information. Figure 15-5 shows that the team is using the following elements to describe the requirements for HOLIS.

• The Vision document will contain the short-term and longer- term visions for HOLIS, including the basic system-level requirements and the proposed features.

• The system-level use-case model records the use cases by which the various actors in the system interact with HOLIS.

• After some debate, the team decided to document the hardware requirements ” size , weight, power, packaging ”for HOLIS's three subsystems in a single hardware requirements specification.

• Since each subsystem of HOLIS is quite software- intensive , the team decided to develop a supplementary specification for each of the three subsystems, as well as a use-case model for how each subsystem interacts with its various actors.

Figure 15-5. Organization of HOLIS requirements information

You'll have the opportunity to see these requirements artifacts develop further as we advance the case study in later chapters. A sample of each is included in Appendix A.