A Tool-Based Hybrid Methodology for Achieving Impactful Cross-Domain Systems Engineering

The U.S. Air Force's 30-year strategy identifies Capability Development as a key area where existing practices are inadequate and need to be transformed in order to keep pace with new threats and the evolving operational environment (American's Air Force: A call to the future, July 2014) [1]. We believe that the traditional model of delegating most systems engineering and design responsibility to capability providers further contributes to delays and design defects, as there is a clear disconnect in the ways that acquirers, users, and both software and systems engineers understand and contribute to a system's design. In this paper, we present a novel approach that uses a combination of technologies that overcome each other's weaknesses, while accentuating each other's strengths, and allows stakeholders with different backgrounds to understand and contribute to a system's design. The result is an improvement in quality, development costs, and schedule performance.