Today, was my first day at Plexus. Plexus is a contract engineering company meaning that they engineer product for other people and do not create any of their own products. After touring their massive labs and design areas, I met with Mr. Alan who is a Product manager. He talked me through how Plexus acquires work and the life cycle of the project. I found it very interesting that every project went through at least six stages with four of them having testing. I have included a picture below of the six stages being requirements, prototyping, engineering confidence, alpha, beta, and then production. This process can take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years. I thought that it was really cool that as an engineer at Plexus you could work on such a variety of projects and see a variety of projects in such a short time period. I had lunch with the Product Managers and learned the wide backgrounds that they come from. While they all had engineering degrees, they ranged from computer engineering to industrial engineering. After lunch I spoke with Jesse, he showed me how they write requirements at Plexus. The most important rule with requirements is that they cannot be subjective as they will be tested; therefore, the requirements must be test able. At Plexus, a requirement that must be in the final product is indicated with a shall in the statement. Additionally, something that is nice to have is indicated with a should. Once these, requirements have been written similar Verification statements are written that describe how one can be certain that the product delivered meets the requirements. Another important aspect of Product Management is called an architecture, this documentation, outlines components that will interact and varies from detailed interactions between individual pieces to broad overviews of what the product does in general. I look forward to another great day. 
