SDOE 651 - Agile Systems Engineering & Architecting: Methods, Processes and Practices
This course presents the systems engineering process with an emphasis on speed and reduced time-to-market. It describes the fundamental principles and processes for designing effective systems, including how to determine customer needs, how to distinguish between needs and solutions, and how to translate customer requirements into design specifications. It explains the fundamentals of system architecting, including functional analysis, decomposition, requirements flow-down and practical heuristics for developing good architectures. The focus of the course is on designing systems that not only provide the required capabilities and performance, but that are reliable, supportable and maintainable throughout the system life-cycle. The concept of operational effectiveness is introduced and the cause and effect relationship between design decisions and system operation, maintenance, and logistics is discussed. The implications of open systems architectures and the use of commercial technologies and standards (COTS) are explicitly addressed, as are the linkages between the early architectural decisions, driven by customer requirements and the concept of operations, and system operational and support costs. Principles and techniques are illustrated with numerous case studies and examples drawn from commercial and defense/aerospace experience. The course utilizes a "hands-on" approach to convey systems engineering and architectural concepts. Students work in small groups to develop a conceptual design for a system that addresses an operational need of their own choosing. They then develop an architectural model for a case study using a systems engineering tool (CORE) to assist in requirements management and functional modeling. This pragmatic approach allows students to discover and assimilate their own "lessons learned" as they explore design alternatives and analyze functional behavior and the physical implications of their evolving system design. The course concludes with a combined Systems Requirements Reviewsign Review in which students present the work of their class projects.