There are so many models to follow in framing an effective systems engineering process that one should hesitate to introduce another. But we are currently failing to make a powerful connection between our enterprise's identity and our customer's needs that will slow our approach to excellence. In this paper we will explore a way to connect a definition of our enterprise in the form of our practices and generic planning to customer needs in a seamless planning process that flows from the proposal period through contract award. This paper was motivated by the U.S. Air Force management initiative called the integrated management system and research accomplished by the author in writing a book by the same title as this paper.
Currently software architecting commonly follows a pattern that is sufficiently different from the systems and hardware architecting pattern of work that it is unnecessarily difficult for management and system engineering people as well as hardware and software people to understand and correlate the two processes. This can lead to a frustrated acceptance on the part of management and systems people that the software people know what they are doing and can be left alone motivated by an inability to understand their methods. Obviously, the whole of the system must be brought under an effective integration, optimization, and management influence, not just the hardware aspects, especially since the hardware component is a decreasing subset in terms of cost and complexity. It is possible to reorder the software development pattern slightly to encourage improved hardware-software integration and management visibility while simultaneously improving the software development process. A model is emerging from research and work activity that promises to supply system and software engineers with a complete model that will be comprehensively effective in transforming a problem space defined by a user community into a precise definition of the problem and solution spaces at the system level as well as throughout the lower tier levels, no matter the physical entities that the system solution will be composed of, including hardware, software, people and procedures, and facilities. In that there is no established name for the aggregate entity, the title Universal Architecting Description Framework has been selected to stretch across the application of the models in an integrated fashion as it could be applied on an unprecedented development program today. This paper offers one form combining unified modeling language (UML), system modeling language (SysML), and four artifacts from traditional structured analysis (TSA). Other UADF are possible and the author has covered two others in a new book by this title.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.