The challenges of systems development
As the world moves into the Information Age, the rate of change is increasing. Information is enabling new business models, such as eBay or Amazon.com, and as a result new demands are placed upon the information systems. System complexity is increasing in response to the capability of languages, technology, and global information flow. Coincident with increasing complexity, the pace of change is creating a need to reduce the time required to deliver solutions. Systems development has not kept pace with the demands to deliver more capability in less time. Development teams, using traditional methods, often still fail to deliver capability, which can be fatal to a business in the Information Age.
The changed context for systems development
Computing technology has advanced so that modern systems are thousands of times more powerful than their predecessors. This change removed resource constraints and is changing the approach to system delivery in fundamental ways. Historically teams struggled to deploy as much functionality using as little computer resource as possible. The development team's primary goal was to delivery a working
In modern systems, fewer components provide more functionality and therefore have greater code counts. Integration is critical. Our systems must integrate with today and tomorrow's systems now. Within the systems themselves, we must integrate components from a variety of sources. We have many technology choices, and software permeates everything. We have improved software development productivity, but our software has increased tenfold in size2. We must update our systems constantly, yet reduce costs across the life span of the system. We must innovate, but also manage risk; we must meet new technical challenges, but also manage cost.
Within the aerospace and defense markets, the changes are especially dramatic due to the changing nature of threats in conjunction with the changes to technology. During the Cold War, defense agencies and suppliers built large and expensive systems. Because these systems were focused on defending against other high technology threats, the high cost and time to develop was not seen as a major issue. With the threats posed by terrorism, this has changed. Terrorists cause disruption with relatively low cost devices and also change their tactics
2David Longstreet, Software Productivity Since 1970, 2002
(http://www.softwaremetrics.com/Articles/history.htm).
cited in Cantor, Rational Unified Process for Systems Engineering, Part 1: Introducing RUP SE Version 2.0, The Rational Edge, August 2003
2Model Driven Systems Development with Rational Products
