Issues and Opportunities for Improvements

This chapter presents some of the issues that can arise when physical systems engineers, software systems engineers, and other engineers attempt to work together in a collaborative manner. It explores underlying reasons for the issues and offers some observations on opportunities for improvement. Effective interactions among engineers improve project schedules and budgets, the features and quality attributes of the deliverable system, and the collective engineers' morale and productivity. The chapter provides background information on systems engineering. Lack of software engineering literacy creates issues at two levels: lack of software engineering literacy for system engineers and lack of software engineering literacy for some who are called “software engineers.” Systems engineering and software engineering are two disciplines divided by a common language. Hierarchy is used in systems engineering to depict functional, product, and work breakdown structures. Packages and classes provide two ways of establishing software hierarchies.