Agile Software Engineering and Systems Engineering at SKA Scale
This paper addresses the challenge of adapting Systems Engineering methodologies for large-scale, software-intensive projects with evolving requirements, which is a problem for project managers and engineers in similar complex endeavors.
This paper discusses the challenges of applying classical Systems Engineering (SE) to software-intensive projects like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, where requirements are fluid. It provides an overview of the system and software engineering processes used in the SKA1 development, highlighting the conflict between traditional and agile SE approaches.
Systems Engineering (SE) is the set of processes and documentation required for successfully realising large-scale engineering projects, but the classical approach is not a good fit for software-intensive projects, especially when the needs of the different stakeholders are not fully known from the beginning, and requirement priorities might change. The SKA is the ultimate software-enabled telescope, with enormous amounts of computing hardware and software required to perform its data reduction. We give an overview of the system and software engineering processes in the SKA1 development, and the tension between classical and agile SE.