Agile Systems Engineering
Hailing from an organization that endorsed and practiced the Agile Methodology not just in software, but in several other aspects of the business outside of software development, agile has become my proverbial hammer for every nail that has come my way.
One particular nail that has been on my mind for a while has been systems engineering with its now standardized and formalized processes and methods. I’m not a systems engineer by training, but much of what I know about the process I have learned by reverse osmosis, having had the opportunity to work alongside some of the most experienced systems engineers, both in small business settings working on smaller scale projects, as well as in large business settings working on large-scale projects.
Recently, however, because of a customer need for modernizing their processes, I have had the opportunity to explore and flesh out the relatively nascent paradigm of agile systems engineering. Two documents in particular stood out:
As the INCOSE briefing points out, agility as a framework predates Agile Development for software. As a paradigm, Agile is a general one that can touch many other application areas, including but not limited to systems engineering, hence, now we have Agile Systems Engineering. The framework is the same, but the outcomes are different: while Agile software development has implementation as a main outcome, Agile Systems Engineering has specifications as the main outcome. With that view, then, all established best practices to implementing Agile for software can directly apply to systems engineering.
Another key, and very exciting, aspect of the Agile Systems Engineering paradigm is the reliance on model-based systems engineering (MBSE), which shifts the focus away from document-based specifications and information exchange, to the specification and exchange of domain models. The model-based aspect then ties in agile software development with systems engineering in an overall Agile mindset.
These developments over the last several years are very much welcome evolutions to the long standing, and rather rigid, approaches to systems engineering.