Design and development assessment

An assessment methodology is described and illustrated. This methodology separates assessment into the following phases: (1) elicitation of requirements; (2) elicitation of failure modes and their impact (risk of loss of requirements); (3) elicitation of failure mode mitigations and their effectiveness (degree of reduction of failure modes); and (4) calculation of outstanding risk taking the mitigations into account. This methodology, with accompanying tool support, has been applied to assist in planning the engineering development of advanced technologies. Design assessment features prominently in these applications. The overall approach is also applicable to development assessment (of the development process to be followed to implement the design). Both design and development assessments are demonstrated on hypothetical scenarios based on the workshop's TRMCS case study. TRMCS information has been entered into the assessment support tool, and serves as illustration throughout.