Trends in Capella

I am delighted to publish for the second time a guest article by Michael Schäfer, who has already last year by Capella and ARCADIA reported. In the following, he reports on the expected trends regarding Capella, an open source platform for system development.

Capella Day 2019

The Capella Day 2019 on September 16, 2019 in Munich is slowly casting its shadow. So, in keeping with the name of this blog, I would like to talk about some trends relating to Capella report. Perhaps this will encourage one or two readers to take a closer look at the topic or to come to Capella Day. The trends are divided into short, medium and long-term topics (as is so often the case in systems engineering).

Short-term trends

The reader will no doubt be wondering what "short-term" means. "short-term". Well, we are looking at the topics up to the end of of 2019, i.e. things that we can look forward to:

• Cybersecurity is a word that is currently an important buzzword in many areas of system engineering. The identification of things worth protecting and their threats from outside (and inside) are topics where methods and tools from system architecture can provide support. ARCADIA as a method and a tool like Capella are a good starting point, but with their extensive tool set they are often "oversized" here. A light version of Capella specifically for modeling cybersecurity aspects will therefore be a welcome addition here.
• Systems-of-Systems and the associated hierarchy of models often pose particular challenges for the authors of the models. However, things that are actuators for a subsystem represent exactly the logical or physical components for the neighboring system concerned. Until now, you had to make do with duplicate model elements that had to be referenced manually. In future, Capella will support shared use, i.e. the sharing of these building blocks between different models
• RAT or with full name the "Rich Authoring Tool" from Reuse Company is a proven tool to support the correct and precise formulation of requirements. Since the management of requirements is also increasingly moving into Capella, it is only logical that RAT is also integrated into Capella, as in other tools. The advanced integration can be seen in this Video already see.

Medium-term trends

Integration is also one of the main topics on the medium-term time scale. Starting with (seemingly) simple topics such as importing and exporting or exchange of models with other SysML/UML tools through to further integration with other modeling tools, many things are conceivable here conceivable and is certainly on every system architect's wish list. system architect. My own experience shows that the transition from a system architecture to a software architecture is often very bumpy (and this is completely independent of the tool or methodology used). I can therefore only welcome the medium-term trend of improving this transition. therefore only welcome.

Long-term trends

As long-term trends are very difficult to predict. One exciting topic revolves around the question of how I can create a simple a simple medium for the readership of my architecture for "read-only read-only access". Capella's web export has proven itself in everyday work. which allows the reader to navigate through the model using only their browser. navigate through the model. There is certainly room for improvement in the long term, such as rapid on-the-fly creation of diagrams, is certainly possible and useful. and useful. Any reader who has ever searched for a specific diagram will appreciate this improvement.

Conclusion

The development around Capella remains exciting, this article can only only touch on many trends in passing. Interested? Then Capella Day 2019 is certainly a good place to find out more about these trends and discuss them.