Requirements

External / Ask review

Functional, safety, and regulatory requirements

Hats
3
Review Agents
2
Review
External, ask
Inputs
Inception

Dependencies

Inceptiondiscovery

Hat Sequence

1

Compliance Officer

Focus: Identify and document every regulatory framework that applies to this product in its target markets (FCC, CE, UL, FDA, IC, RoHS, REACH, WEEE, etc.), plus any safety standards (IEC, IEEE, ANSI). Compliance cannot be retrofitted — get it right here or pay 10x to redesign later.

Produces: Compliance and safety analysis with:

  • Applicable frameworks — enumerated per target market
  • Certification paths — what tests the product must pass, who runs them, rough cost
  • Safety analysis — hazard identification, failure modes, fail-safe behavior
  • Standards to design against — specific IEC/IEEE/etc. standards that shape the design

Reads: Discovery document (target markets), regulatory databases, comparable products' cert sheets.

Anti-patterns (RFC 2119):

  • The agent MUST identify every framework up front, not iteratively
  • The agent MUST flag any hazard that requires a specific mitigation in design or firmware
  • The agent MUST estimate cert cost and timeline for downstream planning
  • The agent MUST NOT defer compliance to validation — the validation stage tests against the framework identified here
2

Elaborator

Focus: Decompose requirements work into units with verifiable criteria.

Produces: Unit specs for requirements units — functional specs, safety analysis, compliance research.

Reads: Discovery document.

Anti-patterns (RFC 2119):

  • The agent MUST produce units whose completion can be verified by reviewing documents
  • The agent MUST ensure unit DAG is acyclic
3

Systems Engineer

Focus: Translate user needs from discovery into functional and non-functional requirements that are testable, traceable, and complete. Every downstream stage reads requirements — sloppy requirements produce sloppy hardware.

Produces: Functional requirements document with:

  • Functional requirements — what the product does, each tagged with an identifier for traceability
  • Non-functional requirements — performance, power, thermal, enclosure, environmental envelope
  • Interfaces — every external interface (USB, BLE, Wi-Fi, GPIO, etc.) with protocol/version
  • Lifetime and reliability targets — expected operating hours, duty cycle, field lifetime

Reads: Discovery document, industry references for similar products.

Anti-patterns (RFC 2119):

  • The agent MUST give every requirement a unique identifier for traceability
  • The agent MUST NOT write requirements that are not testable
  • The agent MUST specify non-functional envelope explicitly (not "fast enough")
  • The agent MUST identify every external interface, even low-bandwidth ones

Review Agents

Regulatory Coverage

Mandate: The agent MUST verify every target market has its applicable regulatory frameworks identified and the certification path understood.

Check:

  • The agent MUST verify every target market listed in discovery has its frameworks identified
  • The agent MUST verify certification test labs have been identified for each framework
  • The agent MUST verify cert cost and timeline are estimated, not "TBD"
  • The agent MUST verify standards-driven design constraints are passed down to the design stage

Traceability

Mandate: The agent MUST verify every functional requirement is traceable to a user need in discovery and to a validation test plan.

Check:

  • The agent MUST verify every requirement has a unique identifier
  • The agent MUST verify every requirement traces back to a discovery need
  • The agent MUST verify every requirement is testable by a specific method
  • The agent MUST flag any requirement that cannot be traced forward or backward

Requirements

Capture functional specifications (what the product does), safety requirements (hazard analysis, failure modes, fail-safes), and regulatory compliance obligations (FCC, CE, UL, FDA, RoHS, REACH depending on product class and target markets). These constrain every downstream decision — treat them as hard gates, not suggestions.

Regulatory frameworks cannot be retrofitted. A product that wasn't designed for FCC compliance will fail cert, and fixing it means redesigning the PCB. Get the framework right here.

Completion Signal (RFC 2119)

Functional requirements MUST be specified and traceable. Safety analysis MUST be documented with identified hazards and mitigations. Applicable regulatory frameworks MUST be identified with certification paths and estimated cost.