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Contents

• Prerequisites
• System design Tools
• Mark's Advice

Prerequisites

To understand the content on this page, you should have read 2024 Perfect SEP Seminar because Mark says this seminar is to learn how to use tools to follow the steps laid out in that one.

Note: The lowercase "design" is on purpose, please do not "fix" this. Unless, of course, you know the difference between design and Design in this context.

System design Tools

• System hierarchy
• TPM allocation
• Functional flow block diagrams
• N^2 charts
• ConOps
• Timeline analyses
• Functional block diagrams
• Data flows
• Etc.

EVERYTHING IS DOCUMENTED! Traces, rationales, and verifications.

"The best way to document a decision is by writing a requirement."

Mark's Advice

Though it seems tedious, it's surprisingly easy and fast. He says the integration and verification goes so well that he always feels like he must be testing it wrong. Though it feels like a whole bunch of extra work every time in the beginning, he's seen it work for his over 50-year SE career.

He recommends spreading Systems Engineers out to design different pieces in the hierarchy in order to get good visibility throughout.

Once one baseline has been established, prior to the Review, he recommends continuing to work by developing the next baseline. Some changes are expected, but he believes that you can't stop working while waiting on reviews and reviewers.