Engineering Environment

Definition

An engineering environment is any development environment that is primarily used by a project team to develop the software components of one or more applications.

Objectives

The typical objectives of the engineering environment are to:

• Improve developer efficiency.
• Improve work product quality.
• Provide the necessary infrastructure to support the engineering tasks of the following teams during development:
  • Architecture Team
  • Change Control Board
  • Configuration Management Team
  • Database Team
  • Environments Team
  • Hardware Development Team
  • Independent Test Team (preparation only)
  • Metrics Team
  • Process Team
  • Quality Team
  • Requirements Team
  • Security Team
  • Software Development Team

Benefits

The typical benefits of the engineering environment include:

• An integrated engineering environment improves developer efficiency.
• A complete engineering environment minimizes work product defects prior to integration and system testing.

Contents

The typical contents of the engineering environment are:

• Hardware Components:
  • Developer workstations or laptops (typically powerful PCs running Windows NT)
  • Configuration management server (for storing work products under configuration control)
  • Local area network with network connection devices (e.g., firewall, router)
• Software Tools:
  • Process Engineering Tools
  • Documentation Tools
  • Configuration Management Tools
  • UpperCASE Tools
  • LowerCASE Tools
  • Database Management Systems
  • Test Tools (for small component testing)

Stakeholders

The typical stakeholders of an engineering environment are:

• Producers:
  • Environments Team
• Evaluator:
  • Environments Inspection Team
• Approvers:
  • Technical Leader
  • Project Manager
  • Customer Representative
• Maintainer:
  • Environments Team
• Users:
  • Architecture Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform architecting.
  • Change Control Board, which uses the engineering environment to perform configuration control.
  • Configuration Management Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform configuration management.
  • Database Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform database architecting, design, and implementation.
  • Environments Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform environments engineering.
  • Hardware Development Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform hardware design, implementation, initial testing, and initial integration.
  • Independent Test Team, which uses the engineering environment to prepare for system testing.
  • Metrics Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform metrics engineering.
  • Process Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform process engineering.
  • Quality Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform quality engineering.
  • Requirements Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform security engineering.
  • Security Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform security engineering.
  • Software Development Team, which uses the engineering environment to perform software design, implementation, initial testing, and initial integration.

Phases

• Business Strategy: Not Applicable
• Business Optimization: Not Applicable
• Initiation: Started. Includes hardware and word processing, configuration management, and upperCASE tools.
• Construction: Maintained
• Delivery: Maintained
• Usage: Maintained
• Retirement: Archived

Preconditions

The engineering environment can typically be started if the following preconditions hold:

• The initiation phase has started.
• The environments team is adequately staffed and trained.
• The engineering environment section of the project environments description document is reasonably complete and stable.

Inputs

The typical inputs to the engineering environment include:

• Work Products:
  • Project Environments Description Document
• Stakeholders:
  • Project Team, which uses the engineering environment to develop and maintain the application and its associated documentation.
  • Process Team, which must ensure that the engineering environment supports the project process.

Guidelines

• Base the engineering environment software on a standard software toolkit.
• The engineering environment must have access to and be accessible to the reuse, multimedia, integration, test, and staging environments.
• Distributed development requires the existance of multiple engineering environments, which may have differing objectives and contents.

Conventions

The engineering environment is typically constrained by the following conventions:

• Engineering Environment Inspection Checklist

Examples

• Not applicable.