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Creators/Authors contains: "Spivey, N."

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  1. Requirements play a pivotal role within the engineering design process as they provide parameters and guidelines, as well as defining the success of a project. While there is significant research that explores how to elicit requirements, there is little experimental exploration of how engineers prioritize requirements based on the stakeholder sources for the requirements. Non- technical factors may affect the prioritization of the requirements. A user study was conducted with sixty- six third year mechanical engineering undergraduate students participating in the experiment. Each student was provided two design problems with a requirements document for each. For one of the requirement documents, participants were also provided information on the stakeholder owner of the requirement (sources). Although all of the requirement sources affected the weight given to requirements – typically in the positive direction – it is found that the source had a statistically significant influence on perceived criticality for only 25% of the requirement cases. To conclude, the sources did prove to affect the prioritization of the requirements. Future work will explore how the sources influence requirements based on different typologies, such constraints versus criteria, or requirements with and without numerical targets. 
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