Barry Steer PhD MSc MIEEE MBCS Director of Business Development – Steer Consulting
Disclaimer
What follows is my interpretation and summary of this presentation at Innovate 2012. If you take this as fact, good for you, but it is an opinion piece and maybe I am not that smart. But maybe I am. Capiche?
Overview
Lots of context given. Conceptual view of showing how Rational Rhapsody and DOORS can be used to create executable specifications. He shows an image.
Steer is definitely a real systems engineer. Shows a diagram of the Hitchens-Kasser-Massie (HKM) framework that I’ve never seen but is very nice showing the layers of Systems Engineering. Steer then goes over the Systems Engineering V.
A diagram of the Rational Harmony Workflow is shown and explained. Then a SysML workflow diagram is shown. Lots of high-level information here, but it’s very dense.
One odd thing is that, in this roo, it appears a laptop cannot be connected at the speaker podium, so Steer is sitting at a table. This makes it harder to concentrate on his presentation. No one is looking at him.
Part 2
I’m really paraphrasing here, but he talks about derivation quite a bit. Then he goes into an initial project structure in Rhapsody.
He shows how Requirements import via Word to DOORS. He says a lot of people don’t understand what’s lost in formatting from DOORS to Rhapsody.
He shows how artifacts are connected to the model in Rhapsody. He shows how DOORS implements traceability.
He goes over use case creation in Rhapsody. And then goes to creating a Black Box Activity Diagram. Seems really nice for system behavior design.
He also demonstrates creating ports, interfaces, and links. You can control execution of the model via a Web browser. I think executable models are awesome.
My Thoughts
OK, I am officially lost. This is really a presentation with screenshots from Rhapsody. I am not a Rhapsody user. He knows his stuff, but there’s not a lot here specific to mobile devices or DOORS. He could be talking about any Systems Engineering development project, not just mobile devices.
Also, I’d still like to see a specific problem/product being solved or derived. A few years ago I saw a Rhapsody presentation where a guy had modeled a helicopter ignition switch. Different countries had different requirements on the number of switches. But he wanted to design one engine that could accept multiple inputs on switches and then test that design. Even though I didn’t know Rhapsody, I instantly understood what he was trying to accomplish and could follow his demo, even though I couldn’t have done it myself from scratch.
This presentation did not accomplish this goal. There was very, very little about DOORS and mobile devices. Frustrating.