Reading assignment: Chapter 11

Homework must be neat and readable.  At the top of every page you must include your name, the assignment number, and the due date.  Clearly indicate the question you are answering. You do not need to copy the entire question, but you must mark the question number and a brief description at the beginning of your answer for each question. You may work with others on this assignment, but your writeup must be your own.

In this assignment, you will develop methods to verify different kinds of requirements.  This exercise considers UChekIt, a self-checkout system being designed for XMart, a national retail chain.   Currently, all XMart checkout lines are staffed by cashiers.  By converting some of the checkout space to UChekIt stations, XMart hopes to save labor and shorten customer waiting times. You work for InnovativeDesigns, Inc, a systems engineering firm hired by XMart to design the UChekIt system.  You have been assigned to the requirements and test team for UChekIt.

Systems engineers have developed a set of requirements for UChekIt.  In this lab, you will work with a sampling of these requirements.

Develop a qualification plan for the requirements. Your qualification plan should address each of the requirements given in this document. For each requirement, consider how it should be qualified.  Should inspection, analysis, demonstration, or test be used?  What procedure will be used to verify that the requirement is met?  Your plan should include:

1. Qualification activities:  Develop a set of qualification activities, each of which verifies one or more requirements. A qualification activity could be a demonstration event, an instrumented test, an analysis resulting from exercising a model or running a simulation, or an inspection. Remember that the same qualification activity could be used to verify several requirements, so you will not need to have as many qualification activities as you have requirements to verify. For each qualification activity, specify:
• A unique ID, to be used to refer to the activity.
• Evaluation type: whether it is a demonstration, test, analysis or inspection.
• A clear description of the qualification activity. Describe the procedure in enough detail that someone other than you could carry it out.
• A list of requirements that this qualification activity verifies.  For each item in the list, describe the success criteria - what results of the activity would verify the requirement, and what results would fail to verify it?
  
2. Requirements verification matrix (see page 25 of the Unit 10 notes for an example): The requirements verification matrix summarizes the requirements and how each requirement is verified.  It has five columns: requirement ID, requirement text, evaluation activity ID, evaluation type (demonstration/test/analysis/inspection), and evaluation description. The column for the requirements text can be a brief summary. For example, for Requirement #1, you might just write "Read UPC bar codes."  Similarly, the evaluation activity description column can contain a brief summary of the qualification activity. For this exercise, you may leave out the results and action columns, because they will be added after the qualification activities are conducted and results analyzed.
   

1. Introduction: describes the purpose of the document; 
   
2. Requirements: contains a numbered list with the full text for each requirement; 
   
3. Qualification Activities: describes a set of qualification activities that will be conducted to verify the requirements; 
   
4. Requirements Verification Matrix: a table connecting the requirements to the qualification activities that verify them.

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