LeanRM
Last updated
Last updated
LeanRM (Lean Requirements Management) is an approach that applies Lean principles to the process of managing requirements in software and systems development. It aims to reduce waste, increase efficiency, and ensure continuous value delivery while maintaining compliance and traceability.
Traditional Requirements Management (RM) in the automotive industry is struggling to keep up with the complexity of modern vehicle development.
Vehicles can now require managing over a million requirements, spanning domains like mechanical, electrical, and software systems. This overwhelming volume has pushed traditional methods to their limits, making it increasingly difficult to track, prioritize, and validate requirements effectively.
Traceability, a cornerstone of requirements management, has become nearly impossible to maintain manually. With every requirement needing links to design, testing, and regulatory compliance, the process is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. As the pace of development accelerates and regulations evolve, requirements often become outdated faster than they can be updated. This volatility exposes traditional processes as too rigid and slow to adapt to constant change.
Automation is another critical gap. Many traditional approaches rely on manual efforts for test management, compliance validation, and change tracking. This lack of automation creates significant bottlenecks, increases the risk of human error, and limits the ability to scale to meet the demands of software-defined vehicles and agile development cycles.
While traditional methods aim to ensure clear documentation, rigorous validation, and regulatory alignment, their document-heavy, manual nature is becoming unmanageable. The growing complexity of modern vehicles, the pressure to meet global safety and emissions standards, and the demand for faster innovation are rendering these approaches insufficient. To remain competitive, the automotive industry needs solutions that are scalable, adaptable, and automated, capable of bridging the gap between traditional frameworks and the agility of modern development methodologies.
Because of the many challenges with traditional requirements management, such as overwhelming complexity, lack of traceability, and slow adaptation to change, LeanRM offers a streamlined, value-focused approach to ensure efficiency, agility, and compliance in modern development.
Value-Driven Requirements – Focus on requirements that deliver real business or customer value.
Just-in-Time Requirements – Avoid excessive upfront documentation; instead, refine and prioritize requirements continuously.
Minimized Waste – Reduce unnecessary documentation, redundant approvals, and delays.
Iterative & Adaptive – Requirements evolve based on feedback, market changes, and testing insights.
Traceability Without Overhead – Use automation and lightweight tracking to ensure compliance without excessive bureaucracy.
Collaboration & Transparency – Engage cross-functional teams and stakeholders early and often.
Traditional Requirements Management (RM) focuses on exhaustive documentation and rigidity, while LeanRM emphasizes agility, value-driven prioritization, and minimizing waste to align with modern development needs.
In Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs) and Continuous Homologation, LeanRM aligns well by:
Ensuring regulatory compliance with minimal process overhead. Supporting incremental software updates with dynamic requirement validation.
Enhancing agility in managing cross-domain dependencies.
Leveraging automation and AI for smarter impact analysis and traceability.
However, despite its benefits, applying MBSE to Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs) presents unique challenges. SDV development often takes a code-first approach, emphasizing rapid software iteration and deployment over structured systems modeling. This can result in gaps in traceability and integration, particularly when balancing fast-moving software development cycles with the more deliberate pace of systems engineering.
As an OEM, you can significantly reduce the number of requirements you actively manage by shifting responsibility while maintaining strategic control. This requires structuring supplier relationships, interfaces, and compliance processes in a way that ensures quality, safety, and regulatory compliance without micromanaging each individual requirement. This will be discussed in the next section.
