Welcome to the PSARE web site!
Find
detailed information on training and consulting
available from authors Derek
Hatley and Peter Hruschka.
This site is companion to the book, Process for System Architecture and Requirements Engineering, by Derek Hatley, Peter Hruschka, and the late Imtiaz Pirbhai, published by Dorset House Publishing Company (2000). On this site, we'll refer to the book as the PSARE book, and to its predecessor, Strategies for Real-Time System Specification, as Strategies.
One goal of this site is to provide an open forum for discussion of the PSARE (pronounced sari, as in the eastern garment) development process and of the Hatley/Hruschka/Pirbhai (H/H/P) methods that support it. To this end, we have established a discussion forum that can be accessed via the link to the left. Another goal is to provide updates, as and when they occur, to the materials in the two books.
In Section 1.6 of the PSARE book, we referred to this site and its discussion forum, stating that there would be an ongoing, participative, online case study of a quick-ticketing system (QTS) and of other systems. Accordingly, we included here a preamble and a set of initial requirements for the QTS, which are accessible via the Case Study link, but It has transpired that most people are too busy with their day-to-day activities to participate in such a project. We'll leave the preamble and initial requirements in place, and if at any time anyone wishes to address them on the discussion forum, we'll be glad to respond.
As in both books, we focus here on real-world, multi-disciplinary systems. For several decades, there has been an increasing focus on software alone, and while it is certainly true that software is now a major part of all systems, it is also true that software alone does nothing. Systems must operate in and interact with the real world, and they do so through numerous technologies - electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, optical, radio, and many others. Moreover, these technologies interact with each other quite independently of software, in both intended and unintended ways.
System development, then, requires that all of these technologies and their interactions are taken into account. Each technology has an engineering discipline that supports it. Unlike other processes and methods, the PSARE process and the H/H/P methods provide a common language with which all of these disciplines can communicate. Since the techniques are not specific to any one discipline or technology, they are equally applicable to all. For example, they apply as well to electrical and mechanical subsystems as they do to computer hardware and software.
Major advances have been and continue to be made in software development techniques, and the current focus is on object-oriented approaches, in particular the UML, the Unified Modeling Language, developed by >Rational Software Corporation and standardized by the Object Management Group. Consequently, we included in the PSARE book some new constructs in the architecture method to make it more compatible with OO approaches (see Chapter 4, and especially Section 4.2). As further advances are made in the melding of PSARE and UML, we shall describe them on this site.