A Systematic Approach to Complex System Design: An Application to Printed Circuit Board Test System Design

摘要

The Systematic Design Methodology (SDM) is a set of concepts and techniques currently under development at MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). The SDM is oriented toward assisting software designers (or design teams) in the task of structuring the architecture - the preliminary design - for a complex system. Essential to the methodology development is the testing of the methodology. The most promising but also the most challenging testing alternative is to test the methodology against real world design problems. This thesis involves testing the methodology in a real world context where real system designers participate in applying the methodology to their design problem at hand. The application system is the test program preparation software of printed-circuit-board functional test system currently under development. Included in this report is a description of the process by which SDM was applied and an analysis of the results obtained. Insights and experiences gained in the use of the methodology are discussed throughout.