Body of Knowledge and Curriculum to Advance Systems Engineering (BKCASE)

Project Charter and Early Project Plan

Vision

"Systems Engineering competency models, certification programs, textbooks, graduate programs, and related workforce development initiatives around the world align with BKCASE."

BKCASE Mission:

1.  Create a SEBoK that is globally recognized by the SE community as the authoritative BoK for the SE discipline.

2.  Create a graduate reference curriculum for SE (GRCSE - pronounced "Gracie") that is globally recognized by the SE community as the authoritative guidance for graduate programs in SE.

3.  Facilitate the global alignment of related workforce development initiatives with SEBoK and GRCSE.

4.  Transfer stewardship of SEBoK and GRCSE to INCOSE and the IEEE after BKCASE releases version 1.0 of those products, including possible integration into their certification, accreditation, and other workforce development and education initiatives.

Value Proposition for SEBoK:

• There is no authoritative source that defines and organizes the knowledge of the SE discipline, including its methods, processes, practices, and tools. The resulting knowledge gap creates unnecessary inconsistency and confusion in understanding the role of SE in projects and programs; and in defining SE products and processes.  SEBoK will fill that gap, becoming the "go to" SE reference.
• The process of creating the SEBoK will help to build community consensus on the boundaries and context of SE thinking and to use this to help understand and improve the ability of management, science and engineering disciplines to work together.
• Having a common way to refer to SE knowledge will facilitate communication among systems engineers and provide a baseline for competency models, certification programs, educational programs, and other workforce development initiatives around the world.  Having common ways to identify metadata about SE knowledge will facilitate search and other automated actions on SE knowledge.

Value Proposition for GRCSE:

• There is no authoritative source to guide universities in establishing the outcomes graduating students should achieve with a master's degree in SE, nor a guidance source on reasonable entrance expectations, curriculum architecture, or curriculum content.
• This gap in guidance creates unnecessary inconsistency in student proficiency at graduation, makes it harder for students to select where to attend, and makes it harder for employers to evaluate prospective new graduates.  
• GRCSE will fill that gap, becoming the "go to" reference to develop, modify, and evaluate graduate programs in SE.

Project Strategy:

1. Publish incrementally/iteratively with GRCSE trailing SEBoK.
2. Create common vocabulary to facilitate communications among the team.
3. Throughout the project, involve professional societies to facilitate quality, acceptance, and their eventual role as       stewards.  As of 20 December 2009, INCOSE, the IEEE Systems Council, and the NDIA Systems Engineering Division are all officially participating in BKCASE. 
4. Build early consensus and maintain it throughout the lifetime of the project.
5. Rely on and include academia, industry, and government from multiple fields for authors and reviewers.
6. Extensively leverage volunteer labor for both authoring and review.
7. Rely on existing source material wherever possible and involve principals from efforts that created source material wherever possible.
8. Leverage the processes used to create GSwE2009 and the Naval Postgraduate School Modeling and Simulation Acquisition Curriculum.
9. Keep completely open and collaborative at a global level - but authors make content decisions.
10. Hold physical workshops every 3 months to synchronize teams and build team relationships - rely on virtual meetings, email, and other collaboration technology at other times.
11. Keep the team focused on the value propositions when conflicts arise.

SEBoK Characteristics:

1. Provide a guide to "all" SE knowledge, but is not the knowledge itself, offering "pointers" to knowledge sources in SE
2. Be authoritative by virtue of the gravitas of the authors, endorsement by professional societies, and adoption by the community
3. Include a taxonomy of the knowledge - "all" SE knowledge fits within the SE BoK
4. Define the boundaries of SE; some knowledge will be unambiguously included in SE; some will be at the boundary and its inclusion will be fuzzy. Fuzzy inclusion is an advantage in a field that is evolving as rapidly as SE.
5. Organize (categorizes) knowledge for fast and efficient retrieval
6. Provide a baseline of SE knowledge at a given time, but be structured to facilitate evolution as new knowledge emerges (additional "pointers") and the field itself changes (changes in taxonomy)

SE Reference Curriculum Characteristics:

1. Provide student outcomes on graduation, expectations for students at entrance, curriculum architecture, and core content that all graduates should master - analogous to GSwE2009.
2. Require student to know or learn about the application of SE in an application domain or business segment.
3. Include companion documents to GRCSE that facilitates understanding how current graduate programs compare to GRCSE guidelines and offers advice to faculty on how to adopt GRCSE guidelines.

Team Composition:

1. Stevens Institute of Technology will lead BKCASE. Art Pyster will be the Principal Investigator and editor with Alice Squires as the primary researcher supporting the project.  Additional faculty and staff support will be provided as required.
2. The Naval Postgraduate School co-leads BKCASE. David Olwell will be the Co-Principal Investigator and co-editor. Stephanie Few will be the primary research associate supporting the project. Additional faculty and staff support will be provided as required.
3. Volunteer authors will work an average of about 1-2 days per month, attend quarterly workshops and participate in periodic virtual meetings.  Approximately 30-40 authors will be sought representing different locales and business segments. Some authors will work on both SEBoK and GRCSE; others will work on only one product.
4. Volunteer subject matter experts (SMEs) will work an average of a few hours per month, not generally attend workshops, and occasionally participate in virtual meetings.  SMEs will provide expertise which the author team lacks; e.g., insights into SE practice in application domains not well represented by the author team.
5. Volunteer reviewers will work as their time permits. Several hundred reviewers will be sought, representing different locales and business segments. Some reviewers will review both SEBoK and GRCSE; others will review only one product.
6. INCOSE and the IEEE Systems Council each will provide 3 volunteer authors and will encourage volunteer reviewers to participate from their membership. The NDIA SE Division will encourage at least one author to participate.
7. Don Gelosh will be the technical point of contact for the U.S. Department of Defense and will coordinate its additional participation, including funding support.
8. Participation of other professional societies will be sought.

Technical Objectives Decided at the Organizing Author Workshop on December 8-9, 2009:

1. The SEBoK organizes domain independent SE knowledge. It provides a structure for that knowledge, defines important terms, summarizes important topics, selectively helps users choose among popular alternative methods, facilitates search, printing, and application by its intended users, and identifies references, which elaborate more fully on all topics.  For Version 0.25, the SEBoK will include a set of primary references based on the expert opinion of the SEBoK authors. For subsequent versions, secondary references may be added.
2. The BKCASE Project will develop recommendations on how INCOSE and the IEEE will maintain and evolve SEBoK in accordance with the BKCASE charter, assuming those organizations become stewards of SEBoK after Version 1.0 is released. Version 1.0 of SEBoK itself will include features to facilitate its maintenance and evolution, including the ability for SEBoK users to readily propose new references and evaluate existing references, as well as readily propose changes to all other aspects of the SEBoK.
3. Primary direct SEBoK users will be (a) practicing systems engineers ranging from novices up through senior experts, (b) those responsible for defining and implementing SE processes within organizations, projects, and programs; (c) those responsible for certifying systems engineers and developing certification programs; (d) customers of SE organizations to help them better select and evaluate those organizations; (e) any project manager, engineer, technologist, researcher, or scientist who needs to know about SE; (f) those who educate and train systems engineers; and (g) the GRCSE author team. The SEBoK will facilitate easy access and use by these different types of users.
4. Secondary SEBoK users will be human resource professionals and other workforce development professionals, senior non-technical managers, and lawyers who will use the SEBoK with the support of systems engineers. The SEBoK will facilitate easy access and use by these users.
5. The ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 process structure will be the initial architecture for the SEBoK. The authors will divide into several teams. Each team will be assigned non-overlapping subsets of 15288 processes. Each team will independently develop initial SEBoK content for their process subset, including methods, techniques, and primary references, taking into account primary and secondary SEBoK users. At Workshop 2, the results of the individual team efforts will be jointly evaluated by the entire author team leading to a revised architecture.
6. Version 0.25 of the SEBoK will be domain independent. Domain dependent knowledge will be captured through case studies of individual systems within specific domains. Those case studies will be companion documents to Version 0.25.  After Version 0.25 is complete, the decision to use case studies as the only means to capture domain specific knowledge will be revisited.

Tentative Schedule Established at the Organizing Author Workshop on December 8-9, 2009:

The original schedule was fairly notional reflecting the early state of the project and will continue to be revisited at each workshop.  Actual and updated milestones are provided in italics below.