Question

Describe and compare “Flow down” and “Boilerplate” requirement analysis strategy.

Answer 1

Flow down and Boilerplate are valid requirements analysis strategies used to constrain solution space to smaller problems to satisfy the larger problems.

• A list of paragraphs numbers and titles are made along with relations to define how each item relates to an item of interest. Hence a complete requirements statement is made.
  This approach raises problems as many kinds of requirements cannot be specifically identified in such a generic listing.
  Example - When we create performance requirements boilerplate to cover every category, still it becomes more difficult to weed out these categories.
  Boilerplates are not effective at a lower level of details in the Interfaces.
• Flowdown has two subordinate techniques known as allocation and derivation.
  Allocation is applied where the child requirement has the same units as the parent requirement and we partition the parent value into child values by some mathematical rule. Where the child requirement has different units than the parent requirement, the value may have to be derived from one or more parent requirements through parametric analysis, use of mathematical models, or use of simulation techniques.
  In flowdown, you must have a set of parent requirements to do the analysis and hence a model must be created to explain the parenting.