Process for System Architecture and Requirements Engineering

Derek Hatley and Imtiaz Pirbhai -- authors of Strategies for Real-Time System Specification -- join with influential consultant Peter Hruschka to present a much anticipated update to their widely implemented Hatley/Pirbhai methods.

Process for System Architecture and Requirements Engineering introduces a new approach that is particularly useful for multidisciplinary system development: It applies equally well to all technologies and thereby provides a common language for developers in widely differing disciplines.

The Hatley-Pirbhai-Hruschka approach (H/H/P) has another important feature: the coexistence of the requirements and architecture methods and of the corresponding models they produce. These two models are kept separate, but the approach fully records their ongoing and changing interrelationships. This feature is missing from virtually all other system and software development methods and from CASE tools that only automate the requirements model.

System managers, system architects, system engineers, and managers and engineers in all of the diverse engineering technologies will benefit from this comprehensive, pragmatic text. In addition to its models of requirements and architecture and of the development process itself, the book uses in-depth case studies of a hospital monitoring system and of a multidisciplinary groundwater analysis system to illustrate the principles.

Excerpt

"The overall purpose of this book is to present a broad approach to the effective development of systems, especially those involving multiple disciplines-as most systems do. We use a variety of practical, real-world case studies to illustrate the nature of systems and the system development process, and we include system models that can be used in the process.

"The book builds on the methods and techniques originally described in Strategies for Real-Time System Specification. It is based on more than a decade of experience, our own and many others', in the practical application and teaching of the methods and techniques. . . .

"The wide acceptance of the methods -- which have become known as the Hatley/Pirbhai methods -- has been gratifying, but not all practitioners have used them correctly or effectively. . . . Our goal, then, is to share the benefit of our experiences, good and bad, in the hope of improving the overall state of system development and the methods and tools that support it." -- from the Introduction  

Derek J. Hatley, formerly of Smiths Industries, is president of System Strategies, an international consulting and training firm based in Jenison, Michigan.

Peter Hruschka is a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild. Based in Aachen, Germany, he helped create one of the first tools to implement the Hatley/Pirbhai real-time method.

At the time of his death in 1992, Imtiaz A. Pirbhai had begun work on a book of case studies now incorporated into Process for System Architecture and Requirements Engineering.