System Engineering, Reliability, Life Cycle Support and Testing: A New Theory of Test for Complex Systems

摘要

The theme of this issue involves the blending of systems engineering, reliability, life cycle support, and testing. It is intuitively clear that doing this should improve the quality of deployed systems, but it is not at all evident how exactly, we are to go about implementing the idea. On the other hand, we feel some urgency in this regard because so many of the systems we are building are so hard to test using traditional approaches. It turns out that the integration of systems engineering (SE) with verification and validation (V&V) in the context of the entire life cycle provides a useful structure within which to tackle the verification of complex distributed systems.