James N. Martin

Processes for engineering a system: an overview of the ANSI/EIA 632 standard and its heritage

The ANSI/EIA 632 standard was developed that describes the “processes for engineering a system.” This standard evolved from EIA/IS 632—the interim standard that describes a systems engineering process. This article gives an overview of the processes and describes key concepts for implementation. It also describes the heritage of this standard, reasons for this particular evolutionary step, and the approach in converting from the interim standard to the full standard. There are 13 processes defined, and each includes representative tasks that can be performed to implement each process. Expected outcomes are defined for each task such that these outcomes can be used as a checklist in performing the processes. Several key concepts are described such as the use of a building block and a hierarchy of building blocks. An important concept is the proper recognition of enabling products that are essential during the engineering of a system to assist in full consideration of the whole system life cycle. ©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Syst Eng 3: 1–26, 2000