How to Automate Requirement Flow Across Layers in a Software Factory

User Demand Value Stream: Defining Value and Validation

The top‑level "Proposal" state gathers raw ideas and combat intents from multiple sources, ensuring no items are missed and recording them in a structured demand pool for later filtering.

In the "Under Review" state, a cross‑functional team of domain experts, architects, and product managers evaluates each proposal for strategic alignment, technical feasibility, resource cost, and overall value, selecting the most promising items for development.

When a proposal is approved, it moves to the "Approved" state, which formally commits the organization to the demand, assigns business priority, and places it into a product or system version plan.

"Decomposed" marks the translation of the approved, high‑level demand into concrete, designable system requirements with clear parent‑child links.

During "Implementation", any child system requirement that enters "Development" or "Design" automatically drives the parent user demand to the "In Implementation" state, providing a visual signal of active value creation.

Once all child requirements reach "Delivered", the user demand transitions to "Pending Acceptance", indicating that all software functions supporting the combat value are complete and ready for formal acceptance.

After authorized personnel confirm successful acceptance, the demand reaches the "Accepted" state, marking the final realization of the combat value.

Finally, the "Closed" state archives the demand after stable operation, capturing lessons learned for future reuse.

System Demand Value Stream: Focusing on Capability Design and Delivery

"Pending Analysis" clarifies and defines the system capability, converting vague statements into precise technical specifications.

"In Design" creates the technical blueprint, including architecture, interfaces, data flows, and algorithm models.

"Reviewed" is a quality gate where senior architects and stakeholders assess feasibility, maintainability, and completeness before proceeding.

"Decomposed" translates the reviewed design into atomic software requirements linked to the parent system demand.

"In Integration" signals that code has been merged and assembled, triggering continuous integration to verify module compatibility.

"In Test" conducts system‑level functional, performance, reliability, and integration testing to confirm the capability meets its definition.

"Ready for Delivery" marks that all engineering activities are complete and the capability is packaged for hand‑off.

"Delivered" indicates the capability has been signed off, deployed to the target environment, and becomes a stable asset supporting higher‑level user demands.

Software Demand Value Stream: Managing Feature Development and Verification

"Ready" is the entry point where a feature meets the definition of readiness: clear description, acceptance criteria, completed design, and available dependencies.

When a developer claims a ready item, its state changes to "In Development", where a feature branch is created, code is written, unit tests are added, and peer reviews are performed.

After code review and merge, the state automatically moves to "In Test", triggering CI pipelines that run unit, integration, and API tests.

Successful automated verification advances the feature to "Pending Acceptance", where product managers validate functional compliance against acceptance criteria.

Once acceptance is confirmed, the feature reaches "Completed", closing the delivery loop and updating upstream system demands.

Automating State Transitions with the Software‑Factory Platform

Relying on manual updates burdens teams and risks out‑of‑sync status information. The platform’s automation engine establishes intelligent state‑linkage rules so that actual engineering progress automatically drives value‑stream transitions, creating a self‑propelling, efficient workflow.

Three rule tables illustrate the linkage logic: