IEEE Spectrum

This is a sponsored article brought to you by 321 Gang.To fully support Requirements Management (RM) best practices, a tool needs to support traceability, versioning, reuse, and Product Line Engineering (PLE). This is especially true when designing large complex systems or systems that follow standards and regulations. Most modern requirement tools do a decent job of capturing requirements and related metadata. Some tools also support rudimentary mechanisms for baselining and traceability capabilities (“linking” requirements). The earlier versions of IBM DOORS Next supported a rich configurable traceability and even a rudimentary form of reuse. DOORS Next became a complete solution for managing requirements a few years ago when IBM invented and implemented Global Configuration Management (GCM) as part of its Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM, formerly known as Collaborative Lifecycle Management or simply CLM) suite of integrated tools. On the surface, it seems that GCM just provides versioning capability, but it is so much more than that. GCM arms product/system development organizations with support for advanced requirement reuse, traceability that supports versioning, release management and variant management. It is also possible to manage collections of related Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Systems Engineering artifacts in a single configuration.

We read with considerable interest the story in the September 2022 issue of The Institute titled “IEEE’s Plan to Help Combat Climate Change.” As IEEE members and as co-principal investigators of the U.S. National Science Foundation initiative, the Engineering Research Visioning Alliance, we agree that engineers, scientists, and technical professionals have a critical role to play in mitigating the effects of climate change and that the role of engineering has not been as prominent as we believe it should be. We hope you agree that it’s time to take action and pursue solutions.In both approach and key priorities, there is significant alignment between the technology areas identified by the IEEE ad hoc committee on climate change and the engineering research priorities identified at ERVA’s inaugural visioning event and the resulting report, The Role of Engineering to Address Climate Change, published in August. The ERVA report highlights specific research directions through which engineering can take the lead and have impact in energy storage and transmission; greenhouse gas capture and elimination; resilient, energy efficient infrastructure; and water, ecosystem, and geoengineering assessment. It’s important to note that ERVA convened academic researchers and engineers in industry to develop the priorities identified in the report. We believe it’s critical to bring all stakeholders to the table to collaboratively envision engineering solutions to address societal challenges such as climate change.ERVA is pleased to count IEEE as an affiliate partner in this important work. We strive to unite the voices of engineering to identify and develop bold and transformative new engineering research directions and to catalyze the engineering community's pursuit of innovative, high-impact research that benefits society. We welcome further conversation with IEEE’s ad hoc committee on climate change and urge The Institute readers to download the report and act on its findings.