Product category: Design and Development Software
News Release from: I-Logix Europe | Subject: Harmony
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 5 October 2004
Systems and software
engineers work in Harmony
Available now from embedded solutions provider I-Logix, Harmony is a new development approach that brings together systems and software engineering
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There are a number of problems that reappear in most systems development projects. First, there is a big conceptual divide between the way development is approached by systems engineers and software engineers. Systems engineers predominantly use functional/procedural orientation, whereas software engineers increasingly use object orientation.
The "great semantic divide" between these disciplines is a common source of error because they use different languages, tools and representations.
This problem is further exacerbated by the "throw it over the fence" hand-off from systems to software, leading to a process gap.
Additionally, requirements are most commonly represented as text, resulting in requirements that are ambiguous, imprecise, incomplete or conflicting.
Finally, long-term management of intellectual property with traditional approaches have proved to be very expensive and error prone due to lack of an integrated process and a common development environment and artefacts.
Harmony addresses all these concerns - and more - with a set of an integrated systems and software workflows, artefact definitions and plans in a tool-independent environment.
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Harmony is a model-based development process based on the UML 2.0 and SysML language.
This common standards-compliant language allows Harmony to provide a seamless integration between functional and object modelling.
Harmony is a "hybrid spiral" incorporating an overall project flow with highly efficient design iterations that provide high quality system specification, design, implementation, and validation.
Strategic issues with traditional approaches, such as ambiguous or incomplete requirements, are managed through the use of model execution and validation.
The resulting requirements models handed off to software engineers are of much higher quality than with traditional text-based approaches.
Model execution and validation further ensures the correctness of the architecture and software design as well.
Whereas traditional approaches necessitate the creation of independent validation tests, in Harmony projects are tested against the requirements throughout the process.
This is possible because Harmony uses model-based requirements instead of text-based requirements.
UML sequence diagrams allow for the unambiguous specification of both requirements and test vectors at the same time.
These test vectors are used not only for final system acceptance testing but also for intermediate design testing in the incremental construction of the system.
The systems engineering workflow can further be broken into sequential set of steps.
Whereas the overall flow is top-down, feedback loops may be executed to integrate additional knowledge gained as the work progresses.
The hardware and software specifications and the interface control documents (ICDs) are handed off as models that can be used directly in the detailed development that follows.
The spiral part of the process follows the system engineering activities.
Harmony uses an iterative spiral, adapted from the popular rapid optimising process for embedded systems (ROPES) process.
The spiral workflow results in a series of validated incremental system releases of increasing capability.
Harmony provides a number of benefits through a seamless integrated process for projects with both systems and software engineers striking an optimal balance between discipline and agility.
The Harmony documentation gives clear guidelines on how to effectively model complex systems under development and define the deliverable artefacts between process phases as well as between engineering disciplines.
The improved workflow greatly reduces the introduction of expensive strategic defects, resulting in higher quality systems, developed in less time with fewer defects.
Harmony is also easily configurable according to project characteristics such as safety-critical factors, complexity, or the degree of hardware/software codesign.
Finally, Harmony is fully compliant with the DODAF, DO-178B and CMMI standards.
Harmony has been developed and is delivered through the I-Logix professional services group.
The company's consulting specialists can deliver Harmony as a stand-alone service, or in conjunction with other services such as the company's rapid deployment package.
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