Digital Engineering Development in an Academic CubeSat Project

Abstract

Digital engineering is increasingly introduced for managing and supporting the development of systems for space. However, few academic teams have the competency needed to manage projects using digital engineering and systems engineering. The subject of this paper is an academic CubeSat project in which a variety of digital engineering techniques are used. The tailoring that has been applied to fit the academic environment including students from different disciplines and levels of maturity is described. This paper shows how a customized Scrum methodology for hardware and software integrated with a workflow in a digital tool environment has given positive results for both the team and the system development. This paper also discusses how to introduce new members to the team and how to train them to work with digital engineering as a multidisciplinary team. This paper presents how the systems engineering and project management activities have been integrated into the academic CubeSat project, evaluate how well this fusion worked, and estimate its potential to be used as a guide for other digital engineering projects.