A Process Decision Table for Integrated Systems and Software Engineering
BARRY W. BOEHM, Jo Ann Lane · 2009
The Incremental Commitment Model (ICM), developed in a recent National Research Council study on integrating human factors into the systems development process, organizes systems engineering and acquisition processes in ways that better accommodate the different strengths and difficulties of hardware, software, and human factors engineering approaches. As with other models trying to address a wide variety of situations, its general form is rather complex. However, its risk-driven nature has enabled us to determine a set of ten common risk patterns and organize them into a decision table that can help new projects converge on a process that fits well with their particular process drivers. For each of the ten special cases, the decision table provides top-level guidelines for tailoring the key activities of the ICM, along with suggested lengths between each internal system build and each external system increment delivery. This paper elaborates on each of the ten cases and provides examples of their use.