CONFERENCES, MEETINGS & WEBINARS Events of relevance to systems engineering
CONFERENCES, MEETINGS & WEBINARS Events of relevance to systems engineering
INCOSE San Diego Chapter: Managing Architectural Complexity Presentations On 17 November, 2021, the INCOSE San Diego (USA) chapter hosted two presentations that addressed the management of system and software complexity by use of MBSE techniques. The first presentation, by Ms. Heidi Jugovic of SAIC, was titled “Managing Architectural Complexity for Digital Transformation” and had been previously presented as a keynote at the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) Conference in October, 2021. Key points include: •
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The primary reason to pursue digital transformation/MBSE is the ability to manage complexity. The level of complexity inherent in today’s systems is impossible to manage without a better set of methods/models. A focus on model craftsmanship is not enough; determine the model’s stakeholders and uses first to drive an appropriate level of model completeness and fidelity. Too much time is spent on building good models; not enough on using them effectively. Formal languages and diagrams improve rigor, communication and consistency out-of-the-box, but diagrams introduce their own form of complexity if just used a pictures. Models can enable rigorous evaluation of architecture “goodness” factors such as cohesion, coupling, cycles, etc. Native MBSE/SysML tools can visualize dependencies, but Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) are a better tool to analyze and gain insight across a diverse set of dependencies and behavioral and structural interfaces. DSM techniques may be used to automatically check architectural compliance over time and reduce architecture decay. Models are only the first step in the Digital Engineering (DE) architecture journey. We must leave behind the old way of using architecture models as pictures and move toward semi-automated analyses of architectures.
The second presentation by Mr. Michael Vinarcik, also of SAIC, was titled “Level-up Your Architecture Game: Enhanced Design Structure Matrices and System Modeling throughout the Lifecycle”. Key points include: • • • •
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There is a growing emphasis among customers in Modular Open System Architecture (MOSA) to enable the transition of software to micro-services and to improve sustainability. MOSA requires enforcement of an architecture from concept to execution. DSMs are a proven technique to show the dependencies between architecture elements. Lattix, a commercial DSM tool, may be used to analyze software for architectural compliance, both up-front evaluation of a proposed architecture and evaluation of as-written code vs. the defined architecture and its rules. Purpose-built DSM tools can provide better direct architecture analysis capabilities than standard SysML diagrams. Model quality is a prerequisite for DSM-enabled architecture analysis, particularly complete capture of relationships.
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