Configuration Management of Sets of Links in a Federated Tool Environment

Abstract

AbstractIn the era of document‐centric systems engineering, large organizations developing complex systems had practical methods of associating drawings, specifications, requirements and other information with each other. Mostly these evolved methods involved part numbers and drawing numbers, although sometimes the methods included mundane techniques such as storing drawings in specific drawers in specific filing cabinets. These manual methods were very labor intensive, did not handle changes gracefully, and were somewhat error prone. As computer software and modeling tools began to displace paper drawings and filing cabinets, a “connect and forget” style of linking evolved. We can see this sort of thinking in the relationships in UML and SysML, but also in other places such as the use of Universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) in the XMI file format underlying UML/SysML, the relationships in DOORS and related requirements tools, as well as the original architecture of OSLC which depended on URIs embedded in design artifacts to establish relationships. While these “click to connect” features provided increased convenience compared to the previous manual numbering approaches, these “hard‐coded” links have introduced a new set of problems. The root of most of the new problems comes in the difficulty of managing this sort of extremely large set of direct links as configuration items in their own right. In a larger system, this sort of link set quickly grows to thousands or even millions of links. Managing change, modularity, variants, subsystem reuse, and so on all become very difficult in the presence of such a large, unplanned, and uncontrolled link set. In this paper, we will review the different approaches to creating and managing such sets of links and provide a concise best practices recommendation for the configuration management of such sets of links.