SEBoK Background
The Body of Knowledge and Curriculum to Advance Systems Engineering Project (BKCASE) was started in fall 2009 to create a community-based Guide to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK) and a Graduate Reference Curriculum for Systems Engineering (GRCSE).
It is also one of the research tasks of the Systems Engineering Research Center. Led by Stevens Institute of Technology and the Naval Postgraduate School, BKCASE is conducted in coordination with several professional societies and is funded both by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the generous volunteer efforts of 70 authors from dozens of companies, universities, and professional societies across 10 countries. For additional information on the BKCASE authors, please see the Acknowledgements article.
Previous work
Previous works on developing a guide to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge include an International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) sponsored online version of the Guide to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (INCOSE Insight 2002) and the INCOSE Handbook which has continued to evolve and is the de facto community statement of systems engineering (SE) knowledge and structure (INCOSE 2011).
Systems engineering knowledge has also been documented through the standards bodies, including ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288, Systems Engineering-System Life Cycle Processes (2008), IEEE/EIA 12207, Software Life Cycle Processes (2008), and ANSI/EIA 632, Processes for Engineering a System (1998, 2003). These efforts have provided a foundation for the SEBoK presented here; however, the goal of the SEBoK is to provide a comprehensive view of all SE knowledge and build upon the traditional approach to performing SE.
Around the world, many universities have launched undergraduate and graduate SE programs and numerous companies and government agencies have defined SE competency models and career paths. However, there are many differences in style and substance between university program curricula, career path models and competency models around the world. The SEBoK and GRCSE products will provide a framework for understanding the similarities and differences in these programs and helping to enable many arbitrary differences to gradually disappear.
Impact
The SEBoK authors believe that the scale of the effort to create the SEBoK, together with the open collaborative process used to write it, will itself have positive effects on the community. The author team includes official INCOSE representatives and Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society and Systems Council representatives, and members of other national and international SE bodies. The effort has included extensive awareness initiatives and an open review process. Through these initiatives, the SEBoK is building consensus on the boundaries and context of systems engineering thinking, including its interfaces to three strongly related disciplines – software engineering, project management, and industrial engineering.
The SEBoK is intended not only to inform practicing systems engineers, but also to develop a common way to refer to systems engineering knowledge, facilitate communication among systems engineers, and provide a baseline for creating and evolving competency models, certification programs, educational programs, and other workforce development initiatives SEBoK Evolution around the world.
Releases
Originally, the BKCASE team anticipated three SEBoK releases, each about one year apart. But after version 0.5 was released, it was clear that another intermediate release was needed before version 1.0. Accordingly, the following versions of SEBoK have been released:
• Version 0.25 – a prototype that would create the first architecture and early content of the SEBoK for limited review and validation.
• Version 0.5 – a version suitable for early adopters.
• Version 0.75 – an interim version used to gather further community feedback and to address the most critical shortcomings identified in version 0.5.
• Version 1.0 – this version, intended for broad use.