Engineering Lifecycle Management. What A Bunch Of Rhetoric

Abstract

AbstractParaphrasing Charlton and Adras, management is a process by which managers reflectively model and share a representation of their own processes to enable themselves to perform their eponymous information‐processing activities of monitoring, evaluating, predicting, and controlling their enterprise and its systems. (Charlton & Andras, 2003) Furthermore, managers manage for particular purposes. Purpose‐driven, they acquire systems to address the needs of the enterprise and they manage their stakeholders, engineering lifecycle tools, and artifacts during the acquisition processes to attain certain goals. Modern model‐based systems engineering tools are effective for modeling a single time the adequately stable compositions of sufficiently static units of structure and behavior. However, today, systems engineers and managers struggle to use these tools to specify, analyse, present, and manage these models as stakeholders and architects incrementally evolve those models over time and across space. Therefore, the management of engineering lifecycle models involves more than reliably storing and retrieving in a timely manner the usual collections of related, versioned artifacts. Rather, because all selections and deployments of the enterprise depend on some responsible actor making a choice, management includes the more formidable service of providing to decision‐making stakeholders arguments that demonstrate the adequacy of contextually‐specific solutions to the enterprise's problems. These decision‐making stakeholders need dialectical (i.e. logical) arguments for a proposed system's satisfaction of constraints such as those that are available from adequately formal modeling notations, solvers, and practices. In addition, they need rhetorical (i.e. persuasive) arguments that convince those stakeholders of the aptness of proposals through trust of the proponents and through warrants which appeal to generally accepted grounds.