March in December

Later this year I will do a short guest appearance, again, in the Vinnova-funded VCC project March/DFEA2020 so today I’m doing a bit of reading, catching up if you will. One of my recurring concerns in the area of MBSE is that there’s really not that much to catch up to. It still seems as if the prevailing ideas are the top-down approach in some form where either method has their solution to achieve traceability and a “Russian doll” situation.

I’m more interested in what aspects of modeling and systems engineering that will benefit your organization and constantly improve performance. To me most of the large MBSE initiatives/methods are very bulky and impose a clear and present risk of putting a lid on engineering and innovation.

Some random questions I find interesting:

How do you move focus from verification to validation? The ability to do trial and error, short prototyping loops etc. are vital, what do you need to support this?

How do you push “decision power” closer to the problem? With an over-weight top-down approach this is impossible. How about creating a more loosely coupled architecture based on patterns and some well-placed poles in the ground designed to keep the solution within acceptable boundaries compared to important attributes?

If you product is multi-faceted you will be using different tools and languages to describe it (don’t try to dig with a fork if you have spoon), how can you provide aid to minimize hand-offs, or at least confusion in hand-offs? Instead of attacking traceability you might need to start in a different end, to really understand the information need and information structure in your organization.

If you are implementing parts of the system in-house you want to give the SW-department the best possible pre-requisites in order to do their job, how can we do the same for those parts developed by suppliers? Can models help us increase transparency where needed in our supplier communication?

Models instead of documents push towards construction and engineering, if our organization has started to lose touch with those disciplines we are in danger of applying Models Based Systems Drawing instead. How can we mitigate that imminent risk?

And why is it that it is so rare to find the notion of a lean or agile mindset in conjunction with MBSE? If we want to run our implementation according to agile principles we need to understand the implications and changes in approach needed when it comes to architecture, integration, systems engineering etc.

West side

Spent two days last week in Gothenburg with all the nice colleagues at our main office.

A lot of business development discussions involving our Vinnova projects, product management and software/system architecture for agile or lean organizations.

As usual it was great fun and a learning experience. Thanks all.

Tomas Sandén discussing model-based systems engineering

Building an aircraft

Starting a new assignment today at exactly 1245 at SAAB (not the Spyker-kind but the flying-kind) and I’m really looking forward to it. It will be a nice change of pace compared to the more research-oriented Vinnova-projects I’ve been involved in recently.

Unfortunately I don’t think I will able to blog about basically anything I do over the coming months, being very secret and all… but since I will keep one foot going in both our architecture and MBSE group I’m sure there will be stuff to share and discuss.

Additionally you can look forward to some guest-blogging around both DCI and Lean from Mats and Gunilla. The pressure is on.

Diverse patterns

Yesterday was spent with two colleagues from our Gothenburg office at SAAB here in Linköping. Together with SAAB we at Know IT are one of the partners in a Vinnova project focused on electrical architecture (more information about our Vinnova commitments will be posted on our homepage in due time). It was a very interesting day with a lot of discussions around functional system safety and patterns. I think above all what struck me was the very competent first impression the two SAAB-employees made, they really knew their way around the block with regards to embedded development and safety. Inspiring!

Yesterday's patterns concerned safety; today the patterns are focused on separation of concern. I’m trying to compile a few but meaningful slides about MDA in order to help a co-worker. MDA for me is more than just transforming models to code; I tend to give the word a somewhat bigger scope than that. For me MDA, done correctly, can be used to bring leverage not only to the product itself but also how you build your organization. Of course if you are a software company MDA can facilitate HW-independent development and re-usable code generation but from my perspective you don’t have to have a programming department in order to gain benefits from an MDA sense of mind.

The basic MDA pattern. The x can be both S and I depending on amount of layers.

[P:Platform, M:Model, S: Specific, I:Independent]

November rain

Still wet, still November, though this morning I felt awesome riding my 7 clicks to work. The Koss on, playing some sort of soundtrack to my life, and as we now thanks to Tom Rowland it is music that triggers some kind of response.

Well the chemical bro in my ears made me creative and I got some good ”uppslag” (not the kind of uppslag translated into centerfold) with regards to my Vinnova work.

I’ll see if I can play in some of those ideas as questions at the training in xtUML and Bridgepoint that will start here at the office in about 30 minutes. If you run you can make it. As you know I’ve taken a keen interest to xtUML and it will be very interesting to hear the tool vendor’s perspective as new input.

Also, strangely enough, I miss Volvo Cars a bit this morning. There is something special about setting up a large international project as we did in 05/06. Hard work, lots of travel, tons of politics and great fun (at least in retrospect 2 years later). Most of all I miss, this morning, that creative but also conflict-filled mix of cultures working with engineers and managers from different countries. Perhaps it is because I’m on a solo mission at the moment and any conflict in my “team” could be classed as some sort of delusion.

"That's what I'm talking about,
empathy. It's about as useless as the Winter Olympics ...
This February on NBC."

Monday

Sort of a Monday today. It felt like riding through a wet blanket to work this morning.

Guess the Monday feeling origins from the fact that I have a lot of interesting tasks at my table now and I have to juggle them around without losing too much focus. My main priority is the Vinnova project for automotive I’m involved in and Tuesday/Wednesday will be dedicated to a, hopefully, very interesting training session on the subject.

I also work a lot with architecture in a lean and agile context at the moment, an interesting subject that fans out and involve more than you would think. And no, not only product management which is the obvious direction to look… there’s also other implications and ideas. But since I made a promise to keep it a secret I will. For now.

Well just got an e-mail from a colleague of mine with a question regards to organizational structure and post-compile configuration files. Fun question and I think Vinnova and Architecture have to wait.

…and Maurice Jones-Drew really used his head when he stopped shy of the TD to run down the clock and deny Jets the opportunity to come back after a FG in the last play. Damn Jaguars. Damn smart players. It’s not about scoring in the moment; it’s at the right moment. Sob.

On we go

Hectic end to last week with Call for presentation, made it, a lot of business planning and some Vinnova-work. No time really to stop and think for a bit even though I probably should have prior to submitting the presentation... well if it gets accepted there will be time to polish the message. I hope. I will probably get back to the presentation and said message here on the blog in due time… writing to an anonymous audience seems to be a good way to move forward.

This week will start in the same tempo and I'm just about to "log on" to E4 on my way to meet an old co-worker/customer. Will be interesting to see how they are handling the official "skitår" 2009.

And I couldn’t be in a better mood because this morning I had to help a colleague of mine with some Signal DataBase, SDB, related questions. It feels good to now and again be able to use all that knowledge collected while I “slangade signaler” back in the days of the “bus”.

Industry participation

A very nice ending to a pleasant work-week.

Visited the board meeting for Modprod during the morning (and got ÅFF-cake) and after a presentation of Know IT TM and what we do, what I do and would like to do I got called in (Sv. adjungerad) into the board of directors for Modprod. The rest of the meeting was very interesting and I learned about OPENPROD which was new to me. Now I just have to meet the deadline next week for the Call for presentations.

During the afternoon some colleguages and I wrapped up a LOTS-analysis we started a week before with regards to a Vinnova-project we are involved in. The most important part was the short term actions which from my end looks really promising.

Don't know how but in between it all I managed to have some sort of philosophical discussion about death, shoes and what not with an old friend from the sunny side of Sweden.
"...'cause here we go again"