Book Image

Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering Cookbook

By : Dr. Bruce Powel Douglass
Book Image

Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering Cookbook

By: Dr. Bruce Powel Douglass

Overview of this book

Agile MBSE can help organizations manage constant change and uncertainty while continuously ensuring system correctness and meeting customers’ needs. But deploying it isn’t easy. Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering Cookbook is a little different from other MBSE books out there. This book focuses on workflows – or recipes, as the author calls them – that will help MBSE practitioners and team leaders address practical situations that are part of deploying MBSE as part of an agile development process across the enterprise. Written by Dr. Bruce Powel Douglass, a world-renowned expert in MBSE, this book will take you through important systems engineering workflows and show you how they can be performed effectively with an agile and model-based approach. You’ll start with the key concepts of agile methods for systems engineering, but we won’t linger on the theory for too long. Each of the recipes will take you through initiating a project, defining stakeholder needs, defining and analyzing system requirements, designing system architecture, performing model-based engineering trade studies, all the way to handling systems specifications off to downstream engineering. By the end of this MBSE book, you’ll have learned how to implement critical systems engineering workflows and create verifiably correct systems engineering models.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Verification and validation

Most engineers will agree with the general statement that verification means the demonstration that a system meets its requirements while validation means the demonstration that the system meets the need. In my consulting work, I take this slightly further (Figure 5.1):

Figure 5.1 – Verification and validation core concepts

In my mind, there are two kinds of verification: syntactic and semantic. Syntactic verification is also known as compliance in form, because it seeks to demonstrate that the model is well-formed, not necessarily that it makes sense. This means that the model complies with the project modeling standards guidelines. These guidelines typically define how the model should be organized, what information it should contain, the naming conventions that are used, the action language used for primitive actions, and so on. Every project should have a modeling guidelines standard in place and it is against...