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)

Managing risk

In my experience, most projects fail because they don't properly deal with project risk. Project risk refers to the issue that a team will fail to meet some or all of a project's objectives. Risk is defined to be the product of an event's likelihood of occurrence times its severity. Risk is always about the unknown. There are many different kinds of project risk, for example:

  • Resource risk
  • Technical risk
  • Schedule risk
  • Business risk

Risks are always about the unknown, and risk mitigation activities, known as spikes in Agile literature, are work undertaken to uncover information to reduce risk. For example, a technical risk might be that the selected bus architecture might not have sufficient bandwidth to meet the system performance requirements. A spike to address the risk might measure the bus under stress similar to what is expected for the product. Another technical risk might be the introduction of a new development technology...