OSEE/Detailed Overview

OSEE was designed from the ground up to be a single tool that captures all artifacts through-out the life-cycle of engineering. Since the original OSEE project use was DoD, very strict guidelines are placed on how we capture, trace and deliver our product. OSEE does this for us.

In addition to solving our specific engineering needs, it was decided that a single engineering framework could be used for any software development project. OSEE was designed to scale from a small team of 1 or 10 to a project of any size.

The team also wanted to address the issues of obsolesce. Too many times, a tool is developed by one or more people to resolve a very specific need. This tool is maintained and updated as needs change. Then the engineers that developed that tool move to other positions. Or the technologies that were used to develop that tool become obsolete. OSEE was designed and developed under the Eclipse open source development environment that is used world-wide. It was developed using one of the leading software languages, Java, and it was made open-source so that others could easily continue its development even if the existing program moved to a different solution.

You can learn more about OSEE at http://www.eclipse.org/osee

What is OSEE

The Open System Engineering Environment (OSEE) project provides a tightly integrated environment supporting lean principles across a product's full life-cycle in the context of an overall systems engineering approach. The system captures project data into a common user-defined data model providing bidirectional traceability, project health reporting, status, and metrics which seamlessly combine to form a coherent, accurate view of a project in real-time. By building on top of this data model, OSEE has been architected to provide an all-in-one solution to configuration management, requirements management, testing, validation, and project management. All of these work together to help an organization achieve lean objectives by reducing management activities, eliminating data duplication, reducing cycle-time through streamlined processes, and improving overall product quality through work flow standardization and early defect detection.

OSEE can be used for

  - Configuration Managed Requirements Development
  - Multiple dynamically configured Problem-Change-Request (PCR) systems
  - Product Unit and Integration Testing
  - Publishing deliverable documents
  - Full traceability from high-level customer requirements to decomposed lower level requirements and even code, test and output files.
  - Full Level A, B and C coverage tracking and reporting
  - Agile Software Development
  - Peer Reviews
  - Process management 
  - Linking in other tools / databases
  - Support for system safety tracking/reporting
  - And any other use cases that need to be developed

The major features of OSEE include

OSEE Artifact Framework

The artifact is the fundamental object in OSEE. All data objects stored within OSEE are artifacts. Artifacts are strongly typed and can store any data throughout the systems engineering lifecycle. Any type of data can be stored in OSEE as an artifact; not only systems engineering data (such as processes and requirements), but also anything from meeting minutes to architecture diagrams.

Variant Management

Products developed in OSEE can take advantage of it's variant management by using the waterfall method of build/release branching off each other as children, or take advantage of our recent changes to a product-type management where each product/feature is managed separately and parts that are different for different customers/use-cases are tagged with their applicability to that version.

Full History

OSEE stores all changes to all artifacts in the database. This allows for accidental changes to be backed-out and also facilitates research into who did what and why.

Dynamically Configured Model

Unlike relational databases where a new table is needed for each type of object, OSEE Artifact Framework is an object database that can be run on any SQL compliant database. Currently, Oracle, Postgres and HSQL are used/tested. New objects can be created dynamically. This include meta data on the artifacts and relations between artifacts. These models are used by the features/applications that are built for different use cases like problem tracking, configuration management, coverage, requirements management and etc.

REST and Web Interfaces

The need to easily access data stored within OSEE drove our architecture to start providing many RESTful (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer) services. And with those services available, the features of OSEE are continually being provided through Web UI.

Unit and Integration Testing

OSEE has a Test Environment that supports both unit and integration test "scripts" that can be run individually or in a continuous integration environment. Emulators can also easily be created to emulate different pieces of hardware.

Problem Change Request / Configuration Management

OSEE has a tightly integrated PCR and CM system built in. This allows any number of teams to track their work within the same system. This allows for a single user-interface for all PCRs, ability to link between "actions", easily group different work for different teams within the same "action" and dynamically configure each teams "work-flow" to be different. Also integrated is a full-blown Peer Review system that easily allows peer reviews to be created against a product, team or action and be tracked similar to the PCRs.

Usage

OSEE is currently used internal to Boeing by the AH64E Apache program and the AH6i program. In addition, the OSEE Framework and some of it applications are in use by the Bosch company for their world-wide operations.

Maturity

Different portions of OSEE are in different stages of maturity. As the Apache program changes, so do the features of OSEE. In addition, all mentioned programs/companies can and have provided new features/fixes to the OSEE code-base. This is done through both the external eclipse.org development processes and the internal OSEE-team development processes.

Contact

More information about OSEE can be obtained by visiting our Eclipse website http://www.eclipse.org/osee or by contacting one of the team leads: Ryan Brooks (ryan.d.brooks AT boeing.com) or Don Dunne (donald.g.dunne AT boeing.com)