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)

Understanding architectural merging

The recipes in the previous chapter were all about system specifications (requirements). In those recipes, we created specifications in an agile way by using epics, use cases, and user stories as organizing elements. One of the key benefits of that approach is that different engineers can work on different functional aspects independently to construct viable specifications for the different aspects of system. A downside of this is that when it comes to creating an architecture, those efforts must be merged together since the system architecture must support all such specification models.

What to merge

During functional analysis, various system properties are identified. Of these, most should end up in the system architecture, including the following:

  • System functions
  • System data
  • System interfaces

Issues with merging specifications into a single architecture

Merging specifications into an architecture sounds easy, right...