FFF, F3I - Fit Form, Function and Interface - A good definition

Are there any good commercial or industrial standards (or sections in those standards) that provide a good definition of either FFF (Fit, Form, and Function)  or F3I (Fit, Form, Function, and Interface)?

I'm in the process of producing engineering processes and it would be useful to gather some sources of information on this in particular, however  it's proving more difficult that most things which seem to be well defined in BS, ISO, AS, Def Stans, etc.

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  • There's some pretty good links to US military specs on the Wikipedia page

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form,_fit_and_function

    For example

    https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0700066.pdf

    I must admit that I try to avoid using those terms now, at least in a formal context. In critical systems it can become apparent that two systems are only truly FFF compatible if they are actually identical - which is not a useful definition! We all tend to get caught out in the end by systems that are intended to be FFF compatible but some niggly aspect of the detailed implementation means they aren't. So we might say at a project start "the intention of the project to develop B is that B will be FFF compatible with A", but we wouldn't formally say at the end "B is FFF compatible with A". What we'd say is "the following design parameters were determined for A, these have been replicated in B". I.e, those are the ones we identified, but we might have missed a crucial one! However, my job is to look at safety-critical systems, so that might well be over-pedantic for other equipment.

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  • There's some pretty good links to US military specs on the Wikipedia page

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form,_fit_and_function

    For example

    https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0700066.pdf

    I must admit that I try to avoid using those terms now, at least in a formal context. In critical systems it can become apparent that two systems are only truly FFF compatible if they are actually identical - which is not a useful definition! We all tend to get caught out in the end by systems that are intended to be FFF compatible but some niggly aspect of the detailed implementation means they aren't. So we might say at a project start "the intention of the project to develop B is that B will be FFF compatible with A", but we wouldn't formally say at the end "B is FFF compatible with A". What we'd say is "the following design parameters were determined for A, these have been replicated in B". I.e, those are the ones we identified, but we might have missed a crucial one! However, my job is to look at safety-critical systems, so that might well be over-pedantic for other equipment.

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