How System Analysis is
viable for Startups
Our experience in small companies, startups, and research projects has shown that traditional requirement and system engineering, as practiced in large corporations for mass-produced products, often proves too cumbersome, inflexible, and complex.
In consequence, it is neglected by startups or for small projects. Critical information are not documented, everyone has his own idea on what needs to be build and acts accordingly. This fact is not only true for coworkers but also for investors, shareholders and customers.
At the same time, everyone agrees that investing a few hours in thoughtful, analytical consideration and its documentation is greatly spend time:
- Understand what customers truly want from your product
- Identify essential components for your product
- Analyze interactions between these components
- Anticipate potential issues or roadblocks which may not be immediately apparent
- Evaluate whether certain aspects are over-engineered or fail to enhance the customer experience
Try it yourself
Create your own product or start with one of our presets:
Your Project
(click to change product title)
Product Requirements
The costumer/user and you want (to) ...Requirements for: [create a product requirement and select it]
Functional
Requirements
(Features that need to be implemented
to fulfill the product requirement.)
Related
Components
(Components that provide the support
for the functional requirement.)
Duplicate components not allowed
Component
Requirements
(What would be on the
datasheet of the component?)
Dependent
Components
(Are there interfaces to
other components of your product?)
Component can not depend on itself.
These aspects represent the core of system and requirement engineerig. To adress this, we developed an easy to use tool tailored to the needs of small projects, companies and startups. Through the choosen process of data input and the offered post-processing capabilities, we enable you to learn more about your product and generate a good documentation in short time.
For a simple product, it takes only little time to feed in all the data. Try it out or have a look through our examples!
Submit your dataset
We will run our post processing steps on your data
and provide you a comprehensive evaluation via email.
How our Post Processing works
Using our in house developed toolchain, we aim to provide you with deeper insights into your product and its underlying complexities. Beyond what you've already discovered, there is more information in the data that can be accessed through post-processing by restructuring and visualization.
Based on your input, we generate figures that support you explaining your product development to investors, co-workers, or partners. The inversion of the requirements tree also delivers a broken-down component requirement document. This is useful in development to show what each component has to fulfill and where interfaces are. Essentially, it serves as a datasheet for each component within your product.
Example: Temperature Sensor
Product Requirement "Measure Temperature"
The figure below shows related components and requirements for the basic function "Measure Temperature".
This demonstrateds clearly which components are necessary to support the task and what characteristics they need to fulfill. Here it becomes clear, that the included battery might be a problem for the given temperature specification. Spotting these issues early in the process might be viable for the success of the whole product.
Component Requirement "Temperature Sensor"
For specifiying the right temperature sensor, a component focused view is helplful.
By inverting the reqirement tree, a specification for the temperature sensor is generated. It shows not only, why it is needed but also what the development engineer or supplier has to acomplish. Dependent components indicate interfaces to other components that can not be changed without communicating and adopting the relevant part.
Summary
This process allows to quickly (within a few hours) generate a complete and well documented picture about your full product. The result helps explaining the complexities to developers, suppliers and investors. It is also a good tool to point out conflicts and indicate optional parts that might need a high effort but do not contribute to the core function.
Spending now a few hours on thinking about the system architecture of a product have will safe you time and money in the future. Promised!