In an Agile environment, systems engineering requires tailored methods and processes to deliver incremental capabilities.
This demands a disciplined approach to coordinating parallel requirements elaboration and prioritization, technical development, operations and sustainment activities.
In the core Agile software development tenet of active collaboration among developers, users and other stakeholders, systems engineers plan an essential role in operational, technical and programmatic integration. In the Agile environment, program leaders must then encourage systems engineers to engage developers, testers, users, and other stakeholders in their disciplined engineering processes.
The International Conference on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) chartered an Agile Working Group to refine the ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288-2015 systems engineering processes to reflect Agile principles.
Those principles included Agile development requiring proactive integration among enterprise architectures, platform architectures and related development efforts, where each of the stakeholder groups are contributing concerns and opportunities from their constituency for the good of the successful release and system delivery. This enables faster, smaller capability deliveries.
Agile systems engineering should also focus on finding the right balance between structure and the flexibility necessary to deliver usable capability aligned with user needs. This can be accomplished with programs that conduct continuous interdisciplinary systems engineering reviews in accordance with DoDI 5000.02 requirements.
Looking at the bigger picture, agile is a process by which a team can manage a project by breaking it up into several stages and involving constant collaboration with stakeholders and continuous improvement and iteration at every stage.
The Agile methodology begins with clients describing how the end product will be used and what problem it will solve. This clarifies the customer’s expectations to the project team.
Once the work begins, teams cycle through a process of planning, executing and evaluating — which might just change the final deliverable to fit the customer’s needs better. Continuous collaboration is key, both among team members and with project stakeholders, to make fully-informed decisions.
In Agile courses by Tonex, participants learn how to work with high level user and customer needs, create use cases, model system specification, model requirements, structure, behavior and traceability.
Non-functional requirements such as usability, safety, security, reliability and performance of systems are also discussed in an agile engineering context with MBSE and SysML.
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