8.4 Related fields

As we see in the beginning of this chapter, principles have a key role in project management. In this section we show some related fields and principles that should be considered during project management.

Project management deals with how to organize things on high level but does not give guidelines or hints how to effectively do the “real” work on lower levels, for example how to design and implement the components, and then how to integrate, test and deploy them. For these reasons other fields have been developed so far, like systems engineering, software engineering, V-models and so on.

Systems engineering

  • “Systems Engineering (SE) is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. It focuses on holistically and concurrently understanding stakeholder needs; exploring opportunities; documenting requirements; and synthesizing, verifying, validating, and evolving solutions while considering the complete problem, from system concept exploration through system disposal.”
  • Guide to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge is a complete and precise description and freely available (www.sebokwiki.org)
  • It is related to the “See the whole” principle of Lean Software Development, Systems thinking, etc.

Software engineering

  • Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, http://www.computer.org/portal/web/swebok/swebokv3 (Free to download after registration)

V-model

  • The core concept of V-model is to have verification and validation steps according to the design steps. Originally a sequential, traditional model (see Chapter 1)
  • There are several variations of the V-model
    • V-model with iterations of some or all the steps
    • Dual V-model for the development of system of systems