Yesterday Donald and myself had a chance to visit the Boeing team leading the OSEE project down in Phoenix. Being there was a treat by itself, I had forgotten how nice it is to be in the warm sun, but it got even better once we were meeting the team.

I had met Ryan (Brooks) and Donald (Dunn) last year in Santa Clara (EcliseCon – did I mention that you should really register soon for this year's show?), where they came out of the blue with a project proposal called Open System Engineering Environment. After a short introduction by Ryan I could easily relate the system's functionality to work that I had done before at IBM and later at Vector Consulting for the Automotive Industry. OSEE really seemed to implement an engineering data management system for embedded development (automotive, aerospace), and the even better news was that it was already operational and had some tools along the V-Development model already in place (ex: requirements management). It looked a lot more promising than most PLM based approaches that I had seen so far (some exceptions apply).

In the next couple of months, I started to introduce the project to a few folks in the aerospace (Topcased project) and in the automotive industry. All the folks got pretty excited, and we were all eagerly waiting for the things to develop. As of today, a lot of code has been checked into the Eclipse repositories, and the team is working on creating a build-able version.

And then yesterday, I got the first presentation of the system (or at least parts of the system, because we just didn't have the time to look at all the components.

And I have to admit – I really liked what I saw. Not only could the folks show me a really nice requirements management environment (that Boeing actually uses for the development of the 'a flying system' – I'm not sure if I can disclose what system it is), but they showed me the deep integration between artifact definition and management and workflow system, the configurability of the database, the interface that you need to integrate 3rd party tools as well as their plans for actual tools along the V-Model. It appears that the OSEE system is also getting more and more attention inside Boeing and is used by other groups in the organization as well.
In my time at IBM we were always hoping that we would have a system like this one day, serving as a configurable data backbone and integration platform.

I was really impressed, and it would have been just a perfect day if I had gotten a test ride on one of these 'flying systems' :-)

Before we departed, we discussed that Ryan and Don should apply for a BoF at EclipseCon (I managed to say the word again!), to have a discussion of the system and the next steps with the the SysEng crowd present. My hope is that the BoF will be sparking a lot of good discussions around OSEE, modeling and development in the SysEng and eventually lead to a lot of activities around OSEE)

In addition, the OSEE folks have a couple of talks where they will present OSEE in more detail. Have a look at the program!

For those of you who are not familiar with the V-Model, a introduction can be found here. It is a model that is used quite frequently in the systems engineering community. And don't get confused, it's not a waterfall development process – you might want to look at it rather than a model for various activities and related development tools along that engineers and managers of a development group have to execute and use during the development of a system.

So, I see you at the BoF!

Ralph