Product Engineering: An Overview
The motive of product engineering is to translate the customer's requirement for a group of description capabilities into a working product. To get this target product engineering-like information engineering must derive infrastructure and architecture. The architecture encompasses 4 distinct system components that are: hardware, software, data and people and databases. A support infrastructure is build and includes the technology needs to tie the elements together and the information example for documents, CD_ROM, video which is used to support the components.
As describe in figure the world view is achieved by system analysis. The overall needs of the product are elicited from the customer. These needs encompass control needs and information, product function and behaviour overall product design, performance, and interfacing constraints and other special requirement. Once these needs are known the job of system analysis is to allocate behaviour and function to each of the 4 components noted above.
Once allocation has occurred component engineering commences. Component engineering is actually a group of concurrent activities which address each of the system components separately, hardware engineering, software engineering, human engineering and database engineering. Every of these engineering disciplines take a domain-specific view but it is important to note which the engineering disciplines must maintain and establish active communication with one other. Element of the role of system analysis is to set up the interfacing mechanisms which will enable this to happen.
The element view for product engineering is the engineering discipline itself applied to the allocated element. For software engineering this means analysis and construction and design modelling activities and integration activities which encompass code generation, testing and support steps. Analysis modelling allocates needs into representations of data, behaviour and function. Design maps the analysis model into data architectural, interface and process designs for the software.
