Publication

As projects become increasingly complex, the need for good systems engineering is paramount. Part of systems engineering is documentation of past events, current activities, and future plans of software, hardware, and technical management. Documentation of the program’s technical plans can require significant effort to keep current and to keep the content synchronized in an environment where change is constant. Add to this issue the fact that many documents have overlapping information and you have additional complications. This often results in the documents becoming obsolete relative to fast moving development activities and can create inconsistencies across the project. The objective of this research was to investigate the ability to align systems engineering (SE) documents such that the program documents track and complement one another, are easier to produce and update, support agile environments, and move towards a data centric rather than document centric focus. The documents that were evaluated for this task were the Systems Engineering Plan (SEP), Test and Evaluation Master Plan (TEMP), and the Information Support Plan (ISP). The tool utilized to assist in this research work was the Systems Engineering Toolkit (SET) developed by the Rotorcraft Systems Engineering and Simulation Center (RSESC) at the University of Alabama – Huntsville.