Turning dreams into specifications. II

For pt.I see ibid., vol.3, no.1, p.22-6, 1993. The first stage of design engineering is to turn the abstract and (usually) ill-formed idea of the customer (his `dream´) into a concrete statement of requirements against which suppliers can tender and carry out detailed design (a `specification´). The eventual success of the project hinges on getting that step right. Having already described the process in general terms and illustrated it with a simple example, the author now looks at some of the tools and techniques which are used to carry it out