Iterative Requirements Engineering and Architecting in Systems Engineering

For the (distributed) development of certain highly innovative software-intensive systems such as semi-autonomous robots, it is not clear which life cycle approach to follow best. Especially in a (local) research environment, the development may typically happen in some bottom-up form of prototyping. In contrast, standard systems engineering would (still) prescribe a waterfall life cycle. Software engineering would strongly suggest some form of iterative and incremental development. Iterative development has high potential for improvements in general systems engineering, but in contrast to pure software development it also has inherent limits. We investigate these issues and propose a new iterative but not incremental life cycle approach. It involves iterations of requirements engineering and architecting, but not of low-level design, implementation and testing. The reason for the latter is inherently given by costs and required time for hardware development.