Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

5Relay Race: The Shared Challenge of Systems and Software Engineering

Amir Tomer

Synopsis

As systems become more and more software intensive, the collaboration between systems engineers and software engineers plays a critical role in system development. While many standards (e.g. CMMI, ISO 15288) address this inevitable pairing, they still make distinctions between the two disciplines, with less focus on how to make them work together continuously throughout the system's life cycle. The sensitive points are the interfaces. There are specific responsibilities that are allocated to each party, but the area of shared responsibilities becomes wider. Interdisciplinary interfaces cannot anymore be implemented as “throwing over the fence” but should rather be perceived as a relay race, where the baton is handed over from one actor to the other through perfect coordination, while both are running very fast. Needless to say that winning the race is a shared challenge, and therefore a baton drop is a shred failure. In this chapter we analyze the areas of responsibility of the two disciplines and identify those requiring shared effort. Then we propose a detailed process, mainly based upon Functional Analysis, through which a software‐intensive system architecture is constructed, covering both structural and behavioral characteristics.

5.1 Introduction

As systems become more and more software intensive, the cooperation between systems engineers and software engineers plays a critical role ...