Why AI Will Force Software Engineering to Embrace Formal Traceability — Whether You Like It or Not
For decades full artifact traceability — requirements, stories, test cases, models, code — etc, has been difficult to accomplish in software engineering. Everyone agrees it’s important — especially in regulated, safety-critical, or long-lived systems — but few teams truly “enjoy” implementing it. Traceability is often seen as overhead: something added late, maintained reluctantly, and justified primarily by audits or compliance. AI may change […]
Agile Without Chaos: Making Requirements Management Work in Regulated Software Teams
Agile adoption in regulated industries often starts with a promise — and ends with a panic. The promise is faster delivery, tighter feedback loops, and teams that can respond to change.The panic arrives when someone asks a simple question: “Can we show how this requirement was implemented, tested, and approved?” For teams in healthcare, aerospace, automotive, energy, or […]
Modern Embedded Systems Are Software Products Now — And That Changes Everything
Modern Embedded Systems Are Software Products Now — And That Changes Everything For years, embedded development was framed as a hardware problem: pick the right microcontroller, manage memory carefully, optimize for timing, and ship. That framing no longer reflects reality. As Jacob Beningo recently observed, modern embedded development is deeply software-intensive. That single statement captures a fundamental shift […]
AI for Engineers: How Modern LLMs Are Transforming Both Firmware Development and Model-Based…
AI for Engineers: How Modern LLMs Are Transforming Both Firmware Development and Model-Based Engineering Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping engineering workflows — not as a replacement for human expertise, but as a powerful accelerator for tasks that once consumed large portions of development time. Two areas seeing major practical benefits are embedded/firmware development and model-based engineering (MBE). […]
What PLM Can’t Do (And Why You Still Need ALM/ELM)
For years, engineering leaders have searched for the mythical “one tool that does everything.”PLM vendors often promise exactly that: a single platform to manage mechanical design, electronics, software, requirements, testing, and change. For more background on ALM/ELM/PLM visit — PLM, ALM and ELM — The battle of three letter acronyms But here’s the truth every modern engineering organization eventually discovers: […]
Modernizing Mainframe Software Delivery: Why Organizations Are Moving from Legacy SCMs to Git or…
Modernizing Mainframe Software Delivery: Why Organizations Are Moving from Legacy SCMs to Git or GitLab Mainframe teams have depended on Software Configuration Management (SCM) tools such as Endevor, SCLM, and ChangeMan ZMF to manage source code, govern promotions, and support mission-critical workloads. These tools were built for stability, compliance, and predictable change control — and they excelled at […]
The Hidden Cost of Poor Traceability — and How to Fix It Across the Lifecycle
The Hidden Cost of Poor Traceability — and How to Fix It Across the Lifecycle Every engineering team believes they “have traceability.”Few actually do. In most organizations, traceability exists only in fragments — requirements in one tool, test results in another, defects somewhere else, architecture in a modeling tool, and changes scattered across spreadsheets and Git systems. Everything is connected […]
The Hidden Value of Traceability in Embedded DevOps
Why linking requirements, commits, and tests is more than paperwork. The truth about traceability Ask most embedded engineers what they think about traceability, and you’ll probably get a groan. It’s usually associated with audits, checklists, or hours of documentation that pull you away from actual engineering. But in reality, traceability is not about bureaucracy — it’s about […]
From CI/CD to MBSE: Automating the Model-Based Lifecycle
How Model-Based Engineering (Rhapsody, Cameo, Capella) can plug into CI/CD Traditional document-centric engineering no longer cuts it. The shift to Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) offers a structured, model-driven way to capture requirements, architecture, behaviour, and verification in a unified environment. Model-Based Systems Engineering (Wikipedia) At the same time, software and firmware teams either are looking into or […]
AI Modeling Assistant for IBM Rhapsody | Practical AI in MBE
From Guest Author Walter van der Heiden I’m very pleased to share something we’ve been building with Andy Lapping, Technical Fellow at SodiusWillert. Together, as IBM Champions, we’ve spent many years working with and around IBM Rhapsody. Andy knows Rhapsody inside out and has been the brilliant mind behind extensions such as Power Pack and Profile […]