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Chapter 8. Conclusion 177
In this meaning, system engineering consists of understanding as much as
possible the stakeholder concerns, capturing those concerns into a consistent
set of requirements, and then specifying a set of system components (hardware,
software, worker instructions) that, when integrated meet the requirements.
These stakeholder concerns are usually broader than those than can be met by
hardware or software alone, for example, total cost of ownership, or mean time to
recovery. System engineering requires the ability to address a very wide set of
concerns with an elegant system design.
MDSD is meant to provide the means to achieve this elegant design.
Systems concerns
As is clear from INCOSE's definition, there is a wide variety of concerns that
must be met to ensure the success of a system.
It is useful to make a distinction between concerns and requirements. Briefly:
Concerns are issues that matter to the stakeholders.
Requirements are a transformation of the concerns into a specification that
can serve as a basis for architecting the system.
Let us briefly consider concerns. As stated above, there are many of them, and
different kinds of them. Consider these items as a starting set (to be added to, or
merged with the set implied in INCOSE's definition), as shown in Table 8-1.
Table 8-1 System concerns
Main concern Subordinate concern
Domain concerns
Security Data integrity
Safety
Physical
Predators [?]
Cost concerns
Development
Fielding
Serviceability (patches, repairs,
hot swap
Operating (see also Operational)
Maintainability, extensibility
Training, adoption
Retirement/Disposal