A Hybrid System Engineering Approach for Engineered Resilient Systems: Combining Traditional and Agile Techniques to Support Future System Growth

摘要

Accommodating new requirements and user driven features is the major challenge of engineered resilient systems. An enterprisecentric system-engineering paradigm provides a holistic framework for guiding future growth of systems. This paradigm requires new processes to support such growth. Traditional system engineering approaches, while helpful in developing system structure and framework, are not adaptive to future growth. New user desired features or requirements can be added to legacy systems, but typically entail unfortunate tradeoffs. To meet new requirements, engineered resilient systems have adopted a hybrid approach of using traditional and agile system engineering. Traditional system engineering approaches handle original concept development and design requirements, while the specific implementation is agile. The hybrid approach presents some application issues such as abstraction (how much of the systems should be designed before agile implementation). Others include how to facilitate user features requiring major design changes; and what are acceptable tradeoffs. These issues are particularly problematic during verification and validation phases when a system fails to meet a particular requirement, which necessitates a design change. In this paper, we present a real world case study of a large-scale data processing and analysis system. Design and implementation of this system took place over two years using a mix of traditional and agile system engineering approaches. This paper presents the current best practices, customization, and the issues of abstraction, design agility, user accommodation, and tradeoffs while using hybrid system engineering approaches. We include lessons learned from the case study and suggest future guidelines.