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This paper presents a preliminary comparison between the role of computer-aided design (CAD) and sketching in engineering through a case study of a senior design project and interviews with industry and academia. The design team consisted of four senior level mechanical engineering students each with less than 1 year of professional experience are observed while completing an industry sponsored mechanical engineering capstone design project across a 17 week semester. Factors investigated include what CAD tools are used, when in the design process they are implemented, the justification for their use from the students' perspectives, the actual knowledge gained from their use, the impact on the final designed artifact, and the contributions of any sketches generated. At each design step, comparisons are made between CAD and sketching. The students implemented CAD tools at the onset of the project, generally failing to realize gains in design efficiency or effectiveness in the early conceptual phases of the design process. As the design became more concrete, the team was able to recognize clear gains in both efficiency and effectiveness through the use of computer assisted design programs. This study is augmented by interviews with novice and experienced industry users and academic instructors to align the trends observed in the case study with industry practice and educational emphasis. A disconnect in the perceived capability of CAD tools was found between novice and experienced user groups. Opinions on the importance of sketching skills differed between novice educators and novice industry professionals, suggesting that there is a change of opinion as to the importance of sketching formed when recent graduates transition from academia to industry. The results suggest that there is a need to emphasize the importance of sketching and a deeper understanding as to the true utility of CAD tools at each stage of the design process.

This paper presents findings from a study of the evolution of requirements in eight parallel student semester long design projects. Weekly requirements documents were collected and analyzed for the number of functional and non-functional requirements defined by each team. Trends were compared with end of project performance success. The findings provide suggestive, not definitive, evidence that (a) a higher number of defined requirements predicted higher project success, (b) early functional requirement definition relates to project success, and (c) it is important to continually evolve the requirements throughout the project. A set of guidelines and recommendations are developed.

Requirement change propagation, the process in which a change to one requirement results in additional requirement changes when otherwise this change would not have been needed, occurs frequently and must be managed. Multiple approaches exist, and have been readily published, for predicting requirement change propagation, analyzing change how a change to one requirement may propagate forward to other, related requirements (global level). However, the type of change encountered within a single requirement (localized level) has not been thoroughly studied and could be used to assist in the global analysis of requirement change propagation. This paper seeks to begin to fill this gap by identifying types of change requirements may encounter. By surveying research performed in the realm of requirement change, a taxonomy of change types is developed. To computationally analyze the changes, the localized requirement changes are represented through syntactical elements to identify which requirements’ parts of speech is affected. Using part of speech language rules, the identification of requirement change type is automatically identified. Further, the automatic identification of requirement change type is used to assist in predicting change propagation, a process currently automated. This bridges the gap between localized and global requirement change in an automated, systematic manner.

This paper presents an industrial case study performed on an in-house developed data management system for an automation firm. This data management system has been in use and evolving over a span of fifteen years. To ensure the system is robust to withstand the future growth of the corporation, a study is done to identify deficiencies that may prohibit efficient large scale data management. Specifically, this case study focused on the means in which project requirements are managed and explored the issues of perceived utility in the system. Two major findings are presented: completion metrics are not consistent or expressive of the actual needs and there is no linking between the activities and the original client requirements. Thus, the results of the study were used to depict the potential vulnerability of such deficiencies.