Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips When you consider it, systems engineers do something that everyone already does. Right? Systems Engineers do a simple task: they ensure that all customer requirements are built, tested, and delivered. They keep lists and tables and all sorts of things that trace all work back to every customer requirement. So why do […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is an old diagram that helps explain what a system does. Sometimes, these old diagrams are lost and need to be found again. Apologies to Google and the Chromecast, but it is a good example to mention. Me, i.e., old engineer: What is that? Young Engineer: It is a Google Chromecast. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A good test provides information—no more and no less. Let’s take a step back to the fundamentals of engineering and building things. Part of building some thing is to perform some tests on the thing. Why perform a test? The oft-cited answer is, “to show that the thing works.” Deep sigh. We […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes smartphones and the like only come in one color. There is more to adding colors than meets the eye. I used to work for an organization that built little gadgets. Every little gadget came in the same color: black. One year I worked on a project where I thought I was […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the best thing to do is put your seat in a chair, your hands on the keyboard, and type in all the data manually instead of writing software to do it. I experienced it at least half-a-dozen times in my 28 years in government: We need to track our inventory. Due […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Should we send our customers to a veterinarian, i.e., someone who is accustomed to working with beings that cannot speak? First, a story: My granddad was a stubborn man. My granddad was ill and went to a doctor, an MD. My granddad was paying the MD a lot of money, so he […]

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by Dwayne Phillips In government, we loved the org chart. We loved it so much that we often forgot that the org chart was not the people. The org chart is a representation of how we organize persons. The org chart is just a picture, not the reality. Often, in soft matters, we confuse the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Before putting your work on a computer, do it by pencil and paper for a year. I developed this guideline about 20 years ago. I kept seeing people spending lots of money (million$) creating databases and such to help them do their work.  Most of the work was simple, like: We have […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Configuration Management is concerned with the integrity of the product. It isn’t complicated. It may not, however, be liked by all. I had a conversation with a co-worker recently about configuration management (CM). We had sat through a series of meetings where CM was tossed about in a swirl of angst and […]

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by Dwayne Phillips If it has software, it can be hacked, i.e., it is not secure. Sorry to write that, but I can’t find any way around it. What a wonderful world. We have computers everywhere. Those computers all run software, which is nothing more than instructions written by persons. And all those persons have […]

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