What this book covers
Chapter 1, Basics of Agile Systems Modeling, discusses come fundamental agile concepts, expressed as recipes, including managing your backlog, using metrics effectively, managing project risk, agile planning, work effort estimation and prioritization, starting up projects, creating an initial systems architecture, and organizing your systems engineering models. The recipes all adopt a systems engineering slant and focus on the work products commonly developed in a systems engineering effort.
Chapter 2, System Specification, is concerned with agile model-based systems requirements – capturing, managing, and analyzing system specifications. One of the powerful tools that MBSE brings to the table is its ability to analyze requirements by developing computable and executable models. This chapter provides recipes for several different ways of doing that, as well as recipes for model-based safety and cyber-physical security analysis, and the specification of details held within the system.
Chapter 3, Developing System Architecture, covers recipes focused on the development of systems architecture. It begins with a way of conducting model-based trade studies (sometimes known as an "analysis of alternatives"). The chapter goes on to provide recipes for integrating use case analyses into a systems architecture, applying architectural patterns, allocating requirements to a systems architecture, and creating subsystem-level interfaces.
Chapter 4, Handoff to Downstream Engineering, answers one of the most common questions asked in relation to MBSE: how to hand the information developed in the models off to implementation engineers specializing in software, electronics, or mechanical engineering. This chapter provides detailed recipes for getting ready to do the handoff, creating a federation of models to support the collaborative engineering effort to follow, converting the logical systems engineering interfaces to physical interface schemas, and actually performing allocation to the engineering disciplines involved.
Chapter 5, Demonstration of Meeting Needs – Verification and Validation, deals with a key concept in agile methods, that you should never be more than minutes away from being able to demonstrate that, while the system may be incomplete, what's there is correct. This chapter has recipes for model simulation, model-based testing, computable constraint modeling, adding traceability, how to run effective walk-throughs and reviews, and, my favorite, test-driven modeling.
Appendix A, The Pegasus Bike Trainer, details a case study that will serve as the basis for most of the examples in the book. This is a "smart" stationary bike trainer that interacts with net-based athletic training systems to allow athletes to train in a variety of flexible ways. It contains aspects that will be implemented in mechanical, electronic, and software disciplines in an ideal exemplar for the recipes in the book.
