9. Plan Development Timelines

In Chap. 8 we described the processes, inputs, outputs, and dependencies of various disciplines and development plans. However, another aspect of MDSE plan development is the information on the phasing or timing of when each plan is required across the system development life cycle. This chapter lays out each major program milestone and illustrates which plans must be in “initial release” maturity and “baseline” maturity during each major phase of program development. The arrows indicate plan dependencies and phasing across program milestones. The point to be made is that plans are not made in a vacuum and require cooperation among all MDSE and management disciplines to ensure that the plans are complete and meet the program needs across the entire program lifecycle. One major point to understand about the plans discussed in Chap. 8 and the timelines presented in Chap. 9, is that the amount of detail needed in each greatly depends on the project size and scope. In some cases these plans are separate documents unto themselves. In other cases they may be a paragraph in an agile Sprint plan that discusses changes as a result of the current plans. But, for the MDSE, these issues must be thought through throughout the SoS design, development, integration and test, and deployment phases. Figures 9.1 and 9.2 illustrate this. Figure 9.1 illustrates a traditional program development cycle [21]. For the development process depicted in Fig. 9.1, the engineering plans are finalized early in the development process and only changed when major program events dictate the changes.