A hybrid analysis and architectural design method for development of Smart Home components

Accurate requirements provide the foundation for successful product development. Determining accurate requirements is difficult in many cases and is especially problematic in new and rapidly evolving domains. Development of smart home technologies provides such a challenge due to their dynamic design environment consisting of emergent technology, with minimal existing systems to evaluate, few standards, and users with vague ideas of the benefits or the possibilities. The most troubling problem, however, is how to optimize user satisfaction considering the wide range of user types and preferences and the dynamic system environment created by constant introduction of new products. For early development in this user-focused environment, we propose a new approach based on the synthesis of well established techniques from software engineering, management theory, and hardware product development. We propose the fusion of the use case and house of quality analysis models, simulators, and prototypes, and information processing theory coordination techniques.