Systems Engineering

What is Systems Engineering?

Systems engineering focuses on analysing and eliciting customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle while considering the complete problem.

Systems engineering takes a holistic view by taking the big picture and understanding all of the different stakeholder views.

Systems engineering with its holistic view helps mould all of the contributors into a unified team effort, forming a structured development process.

How can Systems Engineering help you?

By focussing on the requirements and taking a holistic view early on in a project ensures a greater chance of success. This would align the customer’s understanding and the supplier’s understanding of the requirements from the beginning of the project.

Communicating the Requirements

Our view is that a picture paints a thousand words. By using visual techniques and keeping it simple requirements can be understood by all stakeholders.

Here are what we use:

• Use cases identify the stakeholders and how they interact with the system. For example, the system could be an Emergency Department in a hospital and the stakeholders are anyone or anything that interface with the Emergency Department.
• Scenarios describe one way that a system is or is envisaged to be used in the context of activity in a defined time-frame.
• Activity diagrams as a graphical representations of workflows of stepwise activities and actions with support for choice, iteration and concurrency
• Message sequence diagrams can be used to show the interactions between different interfaces.

Complicated Systems

For more complicated systems we use Enterprise Architect as the tool to model the system and to manage requirements.