THE AMAZINGLY INVARIANT SYSTEMS ENGINEERING PROCESS–A 30 YEAR LOOK

From time to time, systems engineers find themselves debating the subject of the systems engineering process. These debaters are commonly experienced systems engineers that may not, at the time, realize the limitations of arguing from experience. It is the trap of generalizing from a specific. The systems engineering process is well established in the systems engineering literature; it is a pragmatic engineering process that has at its basis the practices of scientific inquiry. The systems engineering literature shows that the fundamentals of this process have changed very little over the past 30 years. This paper will describe the fundamental systems engineering process, as shared by businesses as diverse as telecommunications, agriculture and defense, and will give an example of how that process is practiced in the 1990s at Texas Instruments Incorporated.