Kick-off Your Reliability Program with a Requirements Failure Modes and Effects Analysis

Thoroughly checking requirements in the very early stages of development is extremely important to reducing the risk of out-of-phase rework later in the program's lifecycle. Therefore, one of a development program's first goals is to converge on achievable system design requirements that satisfy the customer's functional and performance needs. Part of this system design requirements development activity is quantifying risks and risk mitigations associated with the requirements, where risk mitigation may include creating new requirements or changing existing requirements. Conducting a Requirements Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) during this early stage of development is an excellent way of reviewing and cutting potential gaps or ambiguous requirements that lead to out-of-program-phase rework. This paper explains what a Requirements FMEA is and its key steps using practical examples. Furthermore, this paper will show the reader how to perform a Requirements FMEA using Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods for even greater benefits.