1954 Airborne Fire-Control — Servomechanisms Lab, MIT

Gestalt Programming — Automatic Factory example

First free-hand computer input

1959 APT Numerical Control Language — ANSI/ISO Standard

1960s MIT Computer-Aided Design Project — Elect. Systems. Lab.

First Software Engineering language, tools, course (1968)

First 3D Display hardware and display file downloading

1969 SofTech, Inc. founded — NASDAQ in 1981

1972 VMM Design of Flexible Manufacturing System — for Cincinnati Milacron

— "Fire-walls", 12 Languages, Non-stop, triple-redundant data recovery, hierarchic CNC control

— Triggered concepts for "Architecture Method" for — the

1973 AFCAM Project — Boeing & SofTech
First use of Structured Analysis

1970s Commercial use of SADT — Standard for all ITT-Europe phones

ICAM Project — SofTech Prime, DoD-wide

Full SADT in Part 1 of contract — Architecture of Manufacturing

Characterization & Coding thru OBJECT MODEL

Geometric Modeling, Process Planning, etc. — with CAM-I

Operational SW Concept (OSC), etc. — Real-time Flight Design

1980s IDEF0,l ,2 in ICAM — IDEF0 now FIPS Pub. #183

Active IDEF Users Group w IEEE Stds Comm on IDEFs for ISO

1990s Foundations of RSA/SADT/IDEF0

"New Look" at original SA plus new insights

The Results: Books, tools, courses, collaborations.

SADT/IDEF0 provides an integrated approach to

· Performing systems analysis and design at all levels for systems comprising people, machines, materials, computers, and information of all varieties — the entire enterprise

· Producing documentation concurrent with development

· Communicating by analysts, designers, users, managers

· Allowing coalition consensus to be achieved not by agreeing to disagree, but by common shared understanding

· Ensuring quality and configuration control via continuous review and approval

· Managing large and complex projects using quantitative and qualitative measures of progress

For teams to work effectively there must be

· Clear divisions of the problem

· Well-defined interfaces

· A way to integrate and interrelate their work

· A common language for communication

· Precise records of decisions

· Visibility

People fulfill various roles in the process:

· Experts with deep domain knowledge in technical, management, marketing, and business areas.

· Authors who are trained to interview experts and express the results in well—structured models of the subject matter.

· Readers, who are trained in the reading rules for the models, including how to make terse comments on their correctness and effectiveness in communicating the subject matter. (Readers may be other authors, or experts, managers, and executives.)

· Technical and Management Review Committees spanning the full range of required expertise and responsibility to monitor (as Readers) and approve project progress and results.

· Project Librarian who circulates Reader Kits in the Reader/ Author Cycle, and maintains the project archives of all results and decisions. 

Three Formal Sayings define the semantics of the SA Language:

The Model Definition: 

M models A to the extent that M correctly answers questions about A.

The most basic model is a proper name for A.  

The Structured Analysis Maxim: 

Everything worth saying
About anything worth saying something about
Must be expressed in six-or-fewer pieces.

 

The pieces are the Structured Analysis Box:

with the Formal Saying: (for its semantics)

Under ¯ Control

Input ® is transformed into ® Output

by the Ý Mechanism

— which augments the inherited means