CH 20 – System of Systems

  1. Do you design automated testing for each of the underlying systems in an SoS or the SoS as a whole?
  2. How do you test in a top-down reductionist approach?
    What are emergent properties in SoS? How is it different from emergent properties in systems?
  3. What are examples of SoS we use today?
    How beneficial is a unified user interface for SoS?
  4. Is there cases when reductionism is effective?
  5. What happens when an essential governing body for a system of systems decides to remove its involvement from the SoS?
  6. What are system APIs?
  7. At what level of seniority does a SWE have to begin applying overarching concepts like System of Systems?
  8. How to distinguish organizational vs. federated systems?
  9. Why are managerial and operational independence are the key distinguishing characteristics of systems of systems when compared to other large, complex systems?
  10. Why is reductionism effective as a basis for engineering problems?
  11. Why is it “practically impossible to unify different interaction models”?
  12. Can we talk about the specifics of a unified user interface and how it interacts with existing systems’ UIs?
  13. What are some everyday examples of data insensitive systems?
  14. How do large companies work through the complexity of these huge systems that they are building?
  15. How will reductionism be used in the future? Using AI?
  16. What kind of real-life examples of lack of control and system functionality led to a huge catastrophe?
  17. What are the techniques SoS testing should take on to address the above problems?
  18. What are the key stages of SoS Developmental process?
  19. Could it be possible to make up a system that is too complex to build a software around (assuming we do not have any hardware limitations for what we want to do)? What could such a system look like? 
  20. Would a software built using more than one language be considered a system of systems (could languages be thought of as systems themselves)?
  21. Why is reductionism effective as a basis for many kinds of engineering? 
  22. How can we reduce system complexity?
  23. If our current software engineering methods and technologies cannot cope with the complexity in modern systems of systems, what laws and policies can governments implement to help and “standardize” systems for easier integration?
  24. Can reductionism provide a conceptual tool for better understanding the gap that exists between system designers and their users?
Scroll to Top