Squeezing the Last Bit out of a Technical Review

Often times on projects with extremely tight schedules and very short durations, the project team does not have the time to document kep aspects of a system. For example external interface specification may not be documented in the form of an Interface Configuration Document. However the designer might have opened change requests/engineering changes and documented what the impact on the interface would be. This practice could lead to missing some requirements, or not looking into all interface design issues.

In situations such as the above (you have a 4 week project to develop a large system, no time or resources to develop a true "ICD") the system engineer feel helpless. One key authority the system engineer has is to use the critical design review to gather these requirements which are all over the place. For example, using the ICD example above, the SE can ask questions like, 'What impact will this CR have on the external interfaces?", or "What test requirements are needed to verify this CR". Capturing this information into a table, the SE can then later reverse engineer a systems interface requirement document, or an ICD.