Allowing industry to take design risks with confidence
Researchers at the OU are helping to save industry time and money through the use of a new engineering approach that guides development processes as well as identifying potential problem areas before a planned change is implemented.
Dr Jon Hall and Dr Lucia Rapanotti of the OU's Computing Department, invented Problem Oriented Engineering (POE), a theory and methodology which bridges the gap between the worlds of software and traditional engineering.
POE allows engineers and industrialists to work together to model development processes and to reason about the effects of design choices before implementation.
POE has improved the store management system design for military aircraft for General Dynamics, UK; established safety assurance criteria across a complex supply chain for Royal Navy vessel control for BAE Systems and improved defect elimination in customer mortgage repayment software affecting Bank of America's mortgage customers.
'Our system identifies the pain points in business process engineering and is particularly suitable for business processes that are risky and fail often and for very expensive processes.'
"POE brings together software engineering with traditional engineering." said Dr Jon Hall. "Researchers have come up with theories about how to do design before and there are lots of methodologies out there, but this is the first unifying theory that allows engineers and industrialists to develop complex embedded software systems and look at the implications of change before implementing it."
Building upon POE's theoretical foundations, Drs Hall and Rapanotti have defined a range of techniques that provide guidance to practitioners and a toolset for them to analyse, synthesise and improve their everyday engineering processes and activities.
"POE is a comprehensive theory that involves stakeholders and accounts for their contribution to the engineering process in a way that has not been done before," said Dr Rapanotti. "It identifies the pain points in engineering processes and is particularly suitable for those that are risky and fail often, as well as for those where cost savings are needed."
Photo credits:
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- Hall, Jon G. and Rapanotti, Lucia (2011). Software engineering as the design theoretic transformation of software problems. Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering.
- Hall, Jon and Rapanotti, Lucia (2009). Assurance-driven design in Problem Oriented Engineering. International Journal on Advances in Systems and Measurements, 2(1), pp. 119–130
- Hall, Jon and Rapanotti, Lucia (2008). The discipline of natural design. In: Proceedings of the Design Research Society Conference 2008, 16-19 July, 2008, Sheffield, UK