This is part of a 1 week course entitled Systems Engineering for LSCITS, which I delivered to students studying for an EngD (Engineering Doctorate) in Large-Scale Complex IT Systems. There are 8 lectures in this part of the course plus some additional material on a case study for discussion.
Lecture 1: Large-scale Complex IT Systems
What do we mean by an LSCITS. Why are these important. Different types of complexity e.g. physical complexity and socio-technical complexity; Scale. Socio-technical systems.
Lecture 2: LSCITS and Socio-technical Systems
Case study: A road pricing system for UK motorways
Introduction to the case study - a road pricing system. Discussion of overall goals and alternative approaches.
Lecture 3: Requirements engineering
What is a requirement? Ways of expressing requirements.
Lecture 4: Requirements engineering processes
Elicitation, analysis and validation. Requirements management.
Lecture 5: Dependability requirements engineering
Emergent system properties. Functional/non-functional requirements and how these are inextricably intertwined. Safety and security requirements.
Lecture 6: LSCITS Engineering
Lecture 7: Design for Recovery
This lecture suggests that, for LSCITS, classical approaches to dependability achievement based on fault avoidance, fault tolerance, etc. are infeasible. Rather, I suggest that we should be designing LSCITS to facilitate recovery when failure occurs.
Lecture 8: Ultra-large Scale Systems
An introduction to the SEI report on ultra-large scale systems.