LANDesk Software spun off from Intel in 2002 and started developing their shrink wrapped products using a variant of extreme programming (XP). They quickly made significant changes to a large legacy system, but felt lacking in their communications with the customer. They expanded their Human Factors team to focus on this problem. The Human Factors team developed personas to integrate the user into the development process. The team had some success with this process, and further improved visibility into the user psyche by working with the development team managers to bring the customer on-site, helping validate the research behind the personas, and improving the developers' understanding of the customer needs.

Abstract. This paper presents an initial viewpoint on an emerging technology: Model Driven System Design (MDSD). In contrast, the current state of practice has been characterized as document centered. Practitioners of system design are well aware of the technical and organizational difficulties of implementing current approaches. By modeling multiple aspects of a system throughout its life cycle, this new view of system design offers dramatic gains in productivity and product quality. MISSION STATEMENTTo characterize model driven system design and identify transition strategies from present document driven approaches.

A recent strategic planning effort at the Savannah River Nuclear Site successfully utilized a model-based system engineering approach to develop a plan for the disposition of stored nuclear waste material. In the beginning, many team members, as well as program management, did not understand how system engineering methods and tools could possibly help the team accomplish its objectives. The perception was that a system engineering approach was overkill -all that was needed were domain experts, a facilitator, and a scheduling tool. Introduction of the model-based approach improved the team's ability to communicate their ideas and intentions. This paper presents the lessons learned during the effort to produce a well received strategic plan, including the supporting information data package that justified our conclusions.

A technical risk management system (TRMS) has been developed for the Fluids and Combustion Facility project which is a facility designed to support microgravity combustion and fluids experimentation aboard the International Space Station Alpha (ISSA). The TRMS incorporates Vitech Corporation's system engineering tool set, CORE, to capture and manage the evolving system design and risk identification, assessment, and abatement activities.

Stating the requirements for systems or business processes as a hierarchical collection of English text that can only be analyzed/ verified by human inspection has proven time and again to be labor intensive and generally, inadequate. Projects employing a traditional document-centered system engineering approach have experienced significant numbers of mis-interpretations of the customer's requirements, or late-detected design errors results in increased costs, schedule slips, reduced capability, or canceled programs. We have historically fixed requirements problems, that should have been understood and resolved early, during integration and test where it is more costly to identify and fix. Now that computerized system engineering support tools are available on the engineer's desktop, the leading edge aerospace/commercial corporations are transitioning from a document-centered to a model-driven system engineering approach to developing, analyzing, and managing explicit system/process specifications. Information and operational models (of varying levels of detail) not only aid in the understanding and communication of intentions such that incorrect assumptions can be eliminated early, they directly support the development of system verification plans.