Product Development Tools

Product-Driven Information Systems

The car in your driveway has 20,000 components, and the plane on the tarmac has a million. The development of modern products begins with thousands or millions of requirements, all of which must be managed through the stages of the product lifecycle.

This lecture briefly discusses early-stage requirements management using the Vee-model, SysML, and RFLP, as well as later-stage information structures known as Digital Twins and Threads.

The Air Compressor SysML example given in the video is deeply discussed in Chapter 3 of the SysML Handbook.

Vendor Videos on SysML

Here are some links to technology vendors videos on some of the topics (under 4 min). I don't promote any one over another, but they provide some context.

• IBM on Requirements Management

• IBM on MBSE

• Siemens on MBSE

• MIT's introduction to their course on SysML

• Autodesk on Generative Design

• RFLP Models using Dassault (Science Direct Journal Article) (Optional)

And this 30-minute podcast goes into more detail:

• 109: Solving Problems with Systems Engineering - Digital Enterprise Society

Waterfall, Agile, and Scrum

This is a short video on the Agile Manifesto... there is lots of material available on Agile, and I encourage you to search. In class, we spend a little time comparing/contrasting Agile (and adaptive approach) to Waterfall (a predictive approach).

SysML, the Vee Model, and Waterfall approaches are all predictive, meaning that we estimate up front the work to be done, and when it will be completed, then decomposes large tasks into smaller ones and try to meet deadlines. Agile is an adaptive approach, in which we don't assume that we can predict accurately more than a few weeks in advance.

The Agile Manifesto

Important Differences

The following video compares and contrasts Waterfall and Agile approaches, from a theoretical standpoint. At ~6 minute mark the speaker discusses the challenges of adopting an Agile approach, but note that her reasoning is due to a lack of understanding in Agile methods by team members and executives.

Agile and Collective Learning

Finally, this lecture by me kinda disses the Waterfall and Vee models, then posits that the true value of Agile and Scrum techniques is as a means to encourage Collective Learning. This in-turn links to Systems Thinking. I am using "Scrum" and "Agile" synonymously... sure, why not? But if you get deeply into this topic (first, good for you!) you will see that the topics have diverged somewhat.