Lessons Learned from 24 Years in Systems Engineering

There are lessons learned from 24 years of successfully setting up requirements engineering / management / development (incl. interfaces with verification & validation, change and configuration management, risk, (functional) safety assurance, ...) and, in particular, IBM Rational DOORS (ex QSS DOORS and then Telelogic DOORS) / DOORS Next for a good number of companies worldwide; training and coaching thousands of engineers for hundreds of up-to multi-billion USD/EUR/CHF projects.

Some of the most important and practical ones concern ‘Requirements Breakdown Structures’ (incl. system of systems decompositions, functional and non-functional areas, …), ‘Traceability Schemas’ (giving the systems engineering types of specifications and their top-level traceability), ‘Attributes Standardization’ (for various types of requirements, verification & validation cases, architecture elements, …), ‘Version/Variant Management’ (with version/variant specific attributes/properties/characteristics …).

Fortunately, they are quite tool independent and universal for different industries (medical devices, railway, automotive, aviation, space, defense, semiconductors, energy, …).