Analyzing Systems for Understandability: Structured Process Flows (SPFs)

Abstract

As industry becomes more disciplined in system engineering, a hallmark of maturity and control is the ability to measure processes. Recent focus on process improvements have included models and metrics. This paper presents a process flow model that is suitable for communicating process descriptions to a wide audience and which can serve as a platform for metrics for both processes and products.Large, complex, distributed command and control systems have been analyzed with a number of coordinated paradigms, including the model described in this paper. Structured Process Flows (SPFs), which were developed at Hughes Aircraft, give an integrated overview of systems complementary to partitioned structured analysis models. It is a leveled, end‐to‐end threaded view of the major processes in a system and provides the necessary first view of the system, while enabling decomposition for details. SPFs are examined as a platform for understanding processes, for exploration of metrics, and as a mechanism for collecting measurements.