Software-reliant systems now tend to be acquired or developed with the expectation that an individual system should interoperate with others as part of a larger network of systems, commonly termed a system of systems.

Organizations in military, civilian government, and commercial domains face challenges stemming the need to engineer systems of systems rather than stand-alone systems, including

• collaborating across independently funded and managed organizations
• migrating to the service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment
• developing SOA testing and web services compliance verification processes
• developing effective system-of-systems governance and acquisition practices

Interoperation—easy to see, harder to do

The vision for hundreds of smoothly interoperating systems can be easily drawn on a PowerPoint slide. However, even solutions that appear simple must be carefully engineered. Consider that organizations must

• learn to work in new ways to emphasize the interactions between systems
• move from maximizing the functionality of individual systems toward a concern for the role of the individual system within a system of systems
• deal with and even exploit the unplanned, unexpected, emergent behavior characteristic of systems of systems

The tasks of designing and developing software with these and similar considerations are considerably different from those for stand-alone systems. Many of the software engineering disciplines—such as requirements engineering, software architecture, testing, maintenance, and support—are experiencing significant change from their traditional norms.

Our view—develop practices for systems of systems

Through our work in system-of-systems practices, we deliver approaches, techniques, and technologies for the interoperation of independently evolving systems of systems, including

• diagnosing the governance and acquisition dimensions in system-of-systems environments
• determining the feasibility of and building a plan for legacy system migration to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment
• evaluating technologies intended to support systems interoperability