The RDD.COM Product Family

The Tools You Need to Solve Your Complex System Challenges

September 2000
Managing Complexity, Cost & Risk

Today's systems require multiple disciplines to design, develop, implement, and operate. Development for these systems requires skilled engineers and managers with controlled processes to reduce performance, cost, and schedule risks. Management of system development requires an agile team, a process that provides early indicators, and a proactive measurement approach.

RDD.COM enables collaborating teams to harness the power of modern information technology so that they can plan and re-engineer their processes, and make changes that improve their efficiency and lower costs. Using this modern technology, teams can manage information throughout the lifecycle, from user needs identification to implementation through the operations phase.

Holagent's new RDD.COM product family provides rigorous configuration management and change control that allows agile collaborating teams control of the risk associated with "requirements creep" or degradation of user needs throughout the lifecycle. This ensures that teams can provide solutions that are timely, cost effective, and optimize the expectations of all stakeholders.

A Framework for More Efficient Design

For more than a decade, RDD-100® technology has been proven to be effective in streamlining system design processes. In the past, the primary users of this technology were the aerospace, defense, and telecommunications industries. Today, all industries recognize the need to manage user expectations and control requirement changes. The need to develop new systems or modify legacy systems to meet evolving user requirements is common to all customers. RDD.COM plays a central role in helping teams meet their business objectives.

RDD.COM can be used for complex hardware and information systems design and re-engineering. It also provides collaborating teams with the ability to engineer and manage requirements with integrated static and dynamic behavior models. RDD.COM's integrated and internally consistent set of data allows a team to quickly and rigorously specify system capabilities and represent them with precise language that reflects the characteristics desired by the user.

Using RDD.COM throughout the lifecycle, a team can capture, record, and report progress on the development of the requirements. The status of the requirements, assumptions, analyses, issues, decisions, and risk assessments associated with a requirement can be ascertained.

To engineer requirements, teams need to understand the user's needs, and the effect and impact of subtle changes on the system. In order to understand these impacts and make rational, risk-reducing decisions, a team needs to model behavior and manage the requirement changes as well as control equipment configuration throughout the lifecycle.

Managing and Engineering Requirements

Managing Requirements

The RDD.COM Methodology Creates a Data Repository From Which Engineers Can:

• Capture source requirements
• Elicit requirements and use models to clarify expectations
• Establish feasibility of alternatives based on resources and cost restraints
• Rigorously define and engineer requirements
• Analyze effects of system failures
• Define and design the behavior of system interfaces
• Refine behavior into discrete processes
• Allocate behavior to architectural alternatives
• Compare and contrast model and data baselines throughout the entire lifecycle
• Re-use sets of engineering data models
• Refine engineering design with increasing levels of detail
• Support process-specific engineering environment through an open public API

Support for Collaborating Teams

Collaboration may involve teams working on other systems. In the past, teams were usually co-located and concerned with only a single product-focus; today, they are geographically distributed and organizationally diverse with a capability- and solution-focus. Teams need technology that will provide each member a private work area without hindering other team members. Teams need the ability to access work in progress, allocate and distribute data and information, and to be able to concurrently review and propose changes.

1. RDD.COM provides several mechanisms to facilitate collaboration. It has been designed to support iterative development and concurrent refinement of requirements.
2. RDD.COM enables teams to integrate individual change proposals and helps them to build consensus. To assist in distributing the work effort, RDD.COM makes it possible for all stakeholders to concurrently review and propose changes. It ensures that the correct approval authorization is in place prior to implementing changes.
3. RDD.COM provides mechanisms that allow a team to freeze (baseline) a configuration of data that represents a contractual information product (document or model set) at any point during the lifecycle. It allows teams to keep the frozen versions for reference while they continue to work and propose changes to the document or model set in a "live version."
4. RDD.COM provides collaborating teams with the ability to hand off data between organizational layers and to efficiently pass baselined data from one design level to another Alternative component designs can be accommodated through data partitioning and storage technology that allows users to re-use specific data in different configurations.

Lifecycle Communication and Design Support

Collaborating teams need to communicate concepts, raise issues, and formulate decisions based on common data and understanding. RDD.COM provides access to data in the repository with client applications that are both web-enabled and non-web enabled.
With RDD.COM, systems can be designed faster, cheaper, and better teams can accelerate time to market and produce higher quality solutions. Teams need to validate requirements, detect inconsistencies, and study logical architectures and their allocation earlier in the lifecycle.
RDD.COM also allows a team to completely re-use data and models. Re-use of validated models and data can help a team to create alternatives and risk assessments much earlier in the lifecycle.

Managing and Engineering Requirements