A hypertext software package to help document system designs

A hypertext-based software package that was created to help engineers with little formal systems engineering experience to document a system design is examined. A hypertext-based object-oriented programming environment allows easy transfer of information within the design and provides a user friendly interface. Tradeoff analysis is automated. This allows fast sensitivity analysis within the tradeoff studies and greatly decreases the time needed to complete the concept exploration. Test results indicate that ease in writing the documentation and completing the analysis is a major benefit, but the software´s slow speed and its inability to automatically reenter extracted data are drawbacks