Development of a research agenda to explore value-based software design
This paper reports on a research agenda and the preliminary work toward understanding how systems engineering processes impact engineering design productivity and outcomes at the individual, team and project level. The research is broken down into five steps: Extending the value-driven design approach to a software application design effort; Developing an agent-based simulation of design team operations; Using the simulation to model a class design team; Evaluating alternative software application design strategies using the agent-based simulation, and; Applying the simulation to an industry based software application design project. Design engineering and systems engineering communities have indicated that the only way to study systems engineering processes for large complex engineered systems is in simulation. The agent-based simulation proposed in this program, along with a previously development larger-scale coarser-grained simulation, will together provide a validation environment for systems engineering methodologies where we can definitively measure what works, what does not work, and why. Copyright, American Society for Engineering Management, 2012.
