[.uk] Introduction to Systems Engineering (Wiley Series in ...

KISS:
Quiz time: You have 60 seconds to determine what the following sentence means: "Systems engineering processes should support operational product functionality, revisability, and transitioning, both at the initial time of operational implementation and later at the time that a system is phased out of service or retired, or reengineered for continued productivity and use." Times up. If you took more than 60 seconds in my shop, you're fired. Halfway through this sentence I would have realized that my time would have been wasted, and I would have moved on. NO ONE in the engineering world should be caught writing such unintelligable gobbledegook. This sentence nailed it for me - I WON'T be pursuing a Masters in "Engineering Management" (largely consisting of 'systems engineering')- my application to ODU is in the trash... Now, to be fair, there is value in understanding the necessity of managing methods and tools for large scale systems development, but not at the expense of the English language and good old fashioned simplicity. I would have said: "From conception to obsolescence, your tools for a product's management had better work and/or improve, or else, .

sage is the gold standard for SE:
. . Andy Sage is the gold standard for SE. As a fellow of INCOSE he clearly knows SE. His classes are always informative and up to date. He is currently working on the cutting edge of Systems Architecture. We can only hope that his notes, which are locked behind GMUs firewall and webct, will be turned into a book. He edited the Handbook of SE as well as editing the incose journal. If he says it, you can take it to the bank. Unfortunately this book is 6 years old now and Armstrong is not in Sage's league, but Andy can turn anyone's drafts into good material. So while good, the weakness is that this book does not reflect the changing view and emphasis of SE. This is not to fault Professor Sage, but merely reflects the fact that even incose cannot agree on what SE is, and that the govt which drives most of SE efforts keeps changing their emphasis. incose even keeps rewriting their handbook as the internal power struggles bring to power different groups with different views of what SE is. The dirty truth is that there are NO good SE books. There are a lot of books on SE that have some good stuff in them but none does the job right and/or is up to date enough. Should you read this book. Probably yes. Along with several others, and then extract your own summary of what is pertinent as most of them have way too much filler and wander off into detailed areas of interest only to the authors. There are a lot of handbooks and reference materials on the web, mostly from govt sites. Some has some excellent content, many are grossly out of date or totally spurious. Especially the OF material from professors at universities who have not kept up to date and still promulgate their 40 year old ideas. Put all together there is a lot fo good info on SE somewhere out there. We can only hope that someone of Sage's ability will finally put it all together. Dr. Sage is probably getting too old to address this and also his current efforts on systems Architecture. Jim Long has promised a good intro book and he is one person that could pull it off well. But he seems to always have a higher priority alligator nipping at him. If the IEEE were to get serious about systems as the keystone to making software work right then they might be able to sponsor a good reference book. That will likely be some years in the future.