Design Requirements and Specifications Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Payload, range, field length and the certification basis between them fix most of what the aircraft will be. Treating requirements capture as administrative rather than as the first and most consequential engineering act is a reliable way to build the wrong aeroplane.

Answer: D

Correct answer: What to build, and how to know we have

That is the whole of requirements engineering in one line. The requirements say what must be achieved; the trade studies and constraint diagram decide the configuration that will achieve it; and verification and validation establish that it has been achieved and that it was the right thing to achieve. Spar strength, stalling speed and skin alloy are all answers that follow, arrived at within the framework this topic sets up.

Answer: A

The statement of work governs the contractual relationship, listing activities, milestones and what must be handed over. The specification governs the product itself, and confusing the two leads to arguments about whether work was in scope.

Answer: B

Agreeing the geometry, loads, power and data crossing a boundary lets two teams or two companies work in parallel without continuous coordination. Interfaces left undefined are among the most reliable sources of late integration trouble.

Answer: C

Committing a programme to a technology at a low readiness level imports schedule and cost risk that the programme may not survive. Assessing readiness explicitly is how that risk is made visible before the commitment is made.

Answer: D

Making risks explicit, with an owner and a planned response, converts vague unease into something that can be managed and reviewed. Risks that are known but unrecorded tend to be rediscovered at the worst possible moment.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Mature it, or pick a proven alternative

The gap is real and must be closed by work, not by optimism. Either the technology is matured deliberately - funded demonstration, rig testing, flight trials - on a schedule that reaches level 6 before the freeze, or a proven alternative is adopted and the immature technology deferred to a later variant. Proceeding and hoping is how programmes acquire the schedule overruns that readiness assessments exist to prevent, and lowering the requirement does not change the physics.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A

Both are true and the reason gives the necessity. Two teams working either side of an undefined boundary will each assume something reasonable, and the assumptions will differ - in the loads carried, the data format, the power available, the space envelope, the units. The mismatch is discovered at integration, which is the most expensive place to find it. A formal interface document fixes the boundary so both sides can proceed in parallel with confidence.

Answer: C

Correct answer: 1 and 2 only

Statements 1 and 2 are correct. Statement 3 is the failure mode of risk management: a register that is written and then filed changes nothing. A risk is managed only when someone owns it, a mitigation is funded and scheduled, the residual likelihood and impact are reassessed as work proceeds, and a trigger point is agreed at which the fallback is invoked.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Specifying the internal design of each system

An interface control document defines the boundary and nothing beyond it - the loads, the data, the power, the fluids, the geometry crossing between the two sides. What each side does internally is deliberately left free, so that either can be redesigned without renegotiating the interface. That separation is precisely what allows the two teams to work in parallel.