Agile Systems Engineering

Agile Systems Engineering presents a vision of systems engineering where specification of requirements, structure, and behavior meet larger concerns such as safety, security, reliability, and performance. Traditionally, systems engineering has resulted in many disconnected paper documents, each attempting to specify some aspect of the system. Errors in the documents themselves and in their interconnection are often missed because the primary means by which quality is ensured is painstaking, error-prone manual review. Leading author Bruce Douglass incorporates Agile methods and model-based development to consider the goals of an entire system and avoid errors that can occur when functions are developed independently and disconnected from the big picture. Douglass covers the lifecycle of systems development, including requirements, analysis, design, and handoff stages to specific engineering disciplines. Throughout, Douglass couples Agile methods with system concepts to address the needs of system engineers, avoid many common specification defects, and improve system quality while reducing the effort and cost of systems engineering. * Shows how to perform functional analysis and tie the analyses back to system requirements, stakeholder needs, system architecture, and interface definition* Explains Agile system architectural specification and allocation of functionality to system components* Includes examples from across industries, taken through their respective stages, including the "Waldo" industrial exoskeleton as a complex system* Covers the lifecycle of systems development, including requirements, analysis, design, and handoff stages to specific engineering disciplines