Capturing Design Process Information in Complex Product Development

From interviewing developers and analyzing examples from industry, the authors have concluded that communication issues during the design process are a key factor of the complexity of product development. These communication issues stem from a lack of insight in the workflow between designers and their resources, and the lack of insight in the relation of this workflow to the system architecture. To the best knowledge of the authors, currently there are no suitable models and tools that allow capturing and understanding such information in an integrated way. This work contributes by providing requirements for tools and models, and proposes a modeling language that fulfils such requirements. With this language we introduce a method for capturing design process information: The language can combine multiple stakeholder-based views on their system aspects of interest with architectural concerns, and can specify which resources in terms of models and parametric information are needed from other stakeholders to develop these aspects. The language was also developed as a stepping stone for automation of design processes.