Agile Systems Engineering

by Bruce Powel Douglass

"" Agile Systems Engineering presents a vision of systems engineering where precise specification of requirements, structure, and behavior meet larger concerns as such as safety, security, reliability, and performance in an agile engineering context.World-renown author and speaker Dr. Bruce Powel Douglass incorporates agile methods and model-based systems engineering (MBSE) to define the properties of entire systems while avoiding errors that can occur when using traditional textual specifications. Dr. Douglass covers the lifecycle of systems development, including requirements, analysis, design, and the handoff to specific engineering disciplines. Throughout, Dr. Douglass couples agile methods with SysML and MBSE to arm system engineers with the conceptual and methodological tools they need to avoid specification defects and improve system quality while simultaneously reducing the effort and cost of systems engineering.Identifies how the concepts and techniques of agile methods can be effectively applied in systems engineering contextShows how to perform model-based functional analysis and tie these analyses back to system requirements and stakeholder needs, and forward to system architecture and interface definitionProvides a means by which the quality and correctness of systems engineering data can be assured (before the entire system is built!)Explains agile system architectural specification and allocation of functionality to system componentsDetails how to transition engineering specification data to downstream engineers with no loss of fidelityIncludes detailed examples from across industries taken through their stages, including the "Waldo" industrial exoskeleton as a complex system

Genres: Engineering

Paperback

First published October 15, 2015

Reviews

[Otto Emanuelsson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had great expectations when I opened this book but I'm afraid that I was quite disappointed.

First, the strength of this book is the outlined way of working with system engineering. When confronted with SysML it is sometimes hard to know where to start. This book gives you a general guide on where you should start your modelling work. I would however prefer a rather more pragmatic approach to modeling since it is easy to create too many diagrams that fill little or no purpose.

And that's one of issues with this book. It claims to be an agile approach to system engineering. However, by only looking at the system engineering part of a product development process and say that it is agile is a joke. If you would follow the suggested process, it would create a lot of documentation which will be hard for all involved colleagues to understand.

The number one purpose of system engineering is to communicate behaviour and structure. Since SysML isn't a universally understood language I would suggest to avoid creating gigantic models and diagrams that only a few would understand.

Unfortunately, this author does not understand agile and is very keen on showing his on modelling skills in the many examples that unfortunately crates a messy book to read page to page.

[Robert Shaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the author brings out his own personality in the book, I feel there is a shorter and better book that could be created from the material.

There are many SysML diagrams throughout the book. This is fine to an extent but it means you need to keep changing pages to see diagrams that are referenced. Also many of the diagrams have spelling mistake so have not been properly reviewed. This drop in quality and the fact you have to constantly change page becomes distracting and put me off analysing the diagrams.