The systems engineer and the software crisis
David Martel Johnson · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 1996
This report examines the software crisis from a systems engineer's viewpoint. It analyses the key areas of requirements specification, verification and validation and software re-use. It assesses some of the solutions to the crisis proposed by the software engineering community and highlights some of their problems and limitations from the systems engineer's perspective.The report describes how, through the use of computer-aided symbolic specification techniques and simulation, and with an understanding of the software development process, the skilled systems engineer can contribute to the resolution of the software crisis. The skilled systems engineer, can through the use of these techniques and by the application of systems engineering methods and project management skills, reduce the demands placed on software engineers, hence reducing the software engineering effort and also reducing the total development cost.