The task does not make any assumptions which engineering disciplines or tools you use. The purpose is to measure the impact of the required change and identify the number of parts (subsystems or components) that can be fully reused versus parts that need to be redeveloped. For the latter, some reuse of existing artifacts may still be possible, but that analysis would be performed inside of each individual component during the development stages. Finally, requirements analysis is performed to ensure that parts of a product variant can be successfully integrated into a relevant and functional solution.

Preconditions:

• A new variant has been requested and established
• A new requirements analysis stream has been created  

Postconditions:

• Estimated effort and scope of impact (amount of engineering work required to satisfy the product variant request)
• Feasibility of the requested variant

Steps:

1. Capture stakeholder (product) requirements for the new variant in your requirements or design management tool.

2. Compare stakeholder requirements of the new variant to its baseline. In this case, the baseline is of the product that we initially branched off the new variant from.

Mark each stakeholder requirement that is new or updated.

3. For each marked stakeholder requirement, initiate Impact Analysis.

a. Analyze and mark the system components that are impacted by the stakeholder requirement. Recommended Practice: Assign meta-data or attributes to the system components, and mark as “Impacted=Yes”. This way a you can later recognize that a particular system component is impacted by the variation in the new variant, and will need to be re-configured to enable development work.

b. Analyze, measure, and document the scope of the change in some measurable way that you use in your standard engineering process (e.g. number of subsystem requirements impacted, number of operations or lines-of-code for software, etc.). Recommendation: Record the scope of change. Use additional properties of the system components to add this additional meta-data and/or record this information in the change management task.

4. Once you iterate through all new or updated Stakeholder requirements, you should have a list of all the impacted components, along with a measure of the total work (engineering man hours) required for each of the subsystems to deliver the new product variant. Document the results in the change management task, before you mark the task as completed.