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)

Measuring your success

One of the core concepts of effective Agile methods is to continuously improve how you perform your work. This can be done to improve quality or to get something done more quickly. In order to improve how you work, you need to know how well you're doing now. That means applying metrics to identify opportunities for improvement and then changing what you do or how you do it. Metrics are a general measurement of success in either achieving business goals or complying with a standard or process. A related concept, a Key Performance Indicator (KPI), is a quantifiable measurement of accomplishment against a crucial goal or objective. The best KPIs measure achievement of goals rather than compliance to a plan. The problem with metrics is that they generally measure something that you believe correlates to your objective, but not the objective itself. Examples of this from software development include the following:

Consider a common...