Five forecasts for systems engineering in 2016

The year is drawing to a close - and this is a popular time to look into the crystal ball. Here are my predictions for 2016:

Agility has been on the upswing for years: especially where security does not play a (major) role, an agile approach can reduce costs and lead to better products because the customer gets a feel for the product to be developed at an early stage and changes are expected from the outset and can be taken into account accordingly.

On the other hand, it is now clear that the increasing complexity of systems can only be tackled with modeling, as the INCOSE SE Vision 2025 provides for.

But where I predict a lot of movement is in the combination of modeling and an agile approach. This is because the automatic, implicit maintenance of relationships between model elements is a particularly efficient way of dealing with the many changes that occur during agile development. Of course, this is already being practiced today, which is why I think we will see a lot more of it in 2016.

As a member of the Society for Systems Engineering (GfSE) and therefore also INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering), I attended the GfSE annual meeting: Membership numbers are increasing exponentially, and the society has so much money that a foundation is being set up. If you combine this trend with current problems, such as vehicle safety, or current trends, such as Industry 4.0, there will be many opportunities for the GfSE to become active. Although there are other organizations that are active in this area, with INCOSE behind it, GfSE is well positioned in Germany to exert influence here.

Eclipse has been trying to gain a foothold in the SE for several years. The better-known projects include PolarSys and Papyrus. So far, the results have been rather disappointing, even though millions have been invested by the industry. The approach is interesting for the industry, as open source makes it possible to become independent of the tool manufacturers and guarantee the long-term maintenance of the tools.

But the tool market is tough: commercial users have the choice of several inexpensive modeling tools, and the quality of the Eclipse tools is simply too poor. Maybe Eclipse will be ready in a few years, but not yet in 2016.

Even if Eclipse is not yet ready as a modeling tool, everyone is talking about openness for two reasons: Reducing costs and planning security.

Linux is a prime example of reducing costs, as it is now widely used as an operating system for embedded systems. Open hardware platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi are also beginning to spread.

In the area of planning security, I see a lot of movement in standards for interfaces. For example, the Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) is now supported by all major tools. OSLC, an open standard for the integration of tools, is also being hotly debated.

The VW emissions crisis is far from over. But even before that, there was massive pressure, whether from new manufacturers such as Tessla in the electric car sector, or from IT companies such as Google and Apple, who have discovered the car as the hottest device for the Internet of Things. In addition, the markets are slowly becoming saturated and countries such as China are increasingly focusing on their own vehicles.

But the automotive industry is also lagging behind in development itself: modeling is still in its infancy, at least compared to aviation, for example. Standard specifications for suppliers contain tens of thousands of largely unstructured requirements. This is an indicator of an inefficient way of working that will not scale for long. But I fear that the German automotive industry does not have the courage or the leisure to tackle this problem.

Image source: Trish2