Systems Engineering has traditionally been focused on ensuring the reliability and robustness of critical systems and making the development activities associated with those systems more predictable. This mission has not changed, but with increasing system complexity predictability is difficult and many systems include tailorable components where user acceptance is critical.

Many of today’s modern systems approaches such as agile software, design engineering, and lean manufacturing encourage a “build-first” philosophy that may be viewed as competing with historical systems engineering approaches. Modern systems engineering must recognize the future model is not a “vee.” It is a circle where continuous iterative development and deployment approaches are normal, and the life cycle can vary by component and development team characteristics.

In this session we will discuss development methodologies that are more flexible and provide an organization multiple options for continuous deployment.

A 4-Box Development Model for Complex Systems Engineering

Over the years, much Systems Engineering effort has been focused on making development activities predictable. Yet, with increasing system complexity, methodology improvements have a hard time keeping up. In this paper, we argue that there is a need to ensure that development methodology is flexible and that development models must be crafted for ensuring that an organization has many options open if parts of the development activities becomes delayed.

This paper introduces a development model that provides the desired level of flexibility. The underlying case is that of fighter aircraft development. The dual-Vee model is used as a baseline, weaknesses in that model are identified and the models developed within Saab Aeronautics for fighter aircraft development is introduced and illustrated. The key element highlighted in the paper is that in order to ensure flexibility, development activities has to be asynchronous with activities integrating product configurations. Lessons learned are identified and the applicability of the proposed models are discussed.

Go to publication

Erik Herzog, Åsa Nordling Larsson, Olof Sundin, Saab group.com
Anna Forsgren Goman, Saab Aeronautics

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) in Large Enterprise Environments

With the introduction of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes, system developers are much more capable of reacting in real-time to changing customer needs, supply-chain disruptions, and technological change.   Much of this CI/CD growth has been driven primarily by the software development industry via the introduction of agile, Dev*Ops and related processes.   In many cases, these systems target a well-defined market and because of the software nature of the product, can quickly be adapted to meeting changing market needs and demands.

The challenge, however, is in implementing CI/CD in large system of systems enterprises comprised of both hardware and software systems characterized by changing requirements; multiple and often separate development pipelines; long development timelines; multiple and often changing vendors; and multiple and highly vulnerable supply chains.  Examples of such complex systems include many US Department of Defense (DoD) programs where multiple interconnected systems are developed, on different timelines, using multiple vendors and supply chains.  In many cases, complete working systems are not available for years or decades.   In my talk I will discuss several approaches to introducing CI/CD into these challenging development environments.

Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment in Automotive

Currently, the Automotive industry is being disrupted by Big Tech companies, making it a rapidly expanding market where software is considered as added value by customers and provides a plethora of new business models. However, this creates tension between the strict foundations laid down by the automotive industries versus the high-risk/high-reward solutions provided by Big Tech companies.

 Being part of what is considered “traditional” in-vehicle-infotainment (IVI), I will share some of my experience, both the good and the bad, on how we have been evolving CI/CD for embedded software in the Automotive domain over the last 10+ years to not only meet our customers’ demands but also compete against the new wave of competition.