The goal of product engineering is to
translate the customer‘s desire for a set of defined capabilities into a
working product. To achieve this goal, product engineering—like business
process engineering—must derive architecture and infrastructure.
The architecture encompasses four
distinct system components: software, hardware, data (and databases), and
people. A support infrastructure is established and includes the technology
required to tie the components together and the information (e.g., documents,CD-ROM,
video) that is used to support the components.
The world view is achieved through
requirements engineering. The overall requirements of the product are elicited
from the customer. These requirements encompass information and control needs,
product function and behavior, overall product performance, design and
interfacing constraints, and other special needs.
Once these requirements are known, the job of requirements engineering is to
allocate function and behavior to each of the four components noted earlier.
Once allocation has occurred, system component engineering commences.
