System engineering: what is it and should a developer delve into it?

Question

IT education

Hello Habr, I read at my leisure about such a direction as "systems engineering". By definition from Wiki we read that it is:

Systems engineering - an interdisciplinary approach and tools for creating successful systems[1]; an interdisciplinary approach encompassing all technical efforts to develop and verify an integrated and life-cycle balanced set of people, product and process system solutions that meet customer needs[2].

In my opinion, it sounds very worthy and tempting - "the approach and means for creating successful systems." They also write that the systems engineering methodology is used to create very complex systems, such as airplanes, spaceships, etc.

Everything seems to be interesting, but there is somehow suspiciously little information on this topic on the Internet. There is not a single intelligible article on this topic on Habré, there are only mentions. There are lectures on YouTube by a certain Anatoly Levenchuk (also the author of a book about systems thinking), but I watched 1.5 hours of his chatter and realized that this was some kind of scam. In the video, solid water, and nothing more.

From literature that is serious in my opinion, I found "System Engineering. Principles and Practice" by Kosyakov, Beamer. But haven't read it yet.

As I understand it, systems engineering is something from the field of systems analysis and general systems theory. On system analysis and general systems theory read "Applied Systems Analysis" Tarasenko, last year for general development. In general, this is all interesting, but I see no prospects for a developer to study system analysis. We just don't need it professionally.

Then the question is, what about systems engineering ? Does it make sense for a developer to study this area, or is it all pseudoscience and pseudodiscipline? One gets the impression that in the Russian Federation this area is either simply not developed, or this is really some kind of deception. What do you think? Will it be good?

Answer 1

System analysis (system theory) is a paradigm of modern science. It is possible and necessary to understand its foundations and principles for general development (including the developer). And about the named books, you can recall the advice of prof. Preobrazhensky about reading Soviet newspapers.

Answer 2

In fact, this is just a systematic approach that has been formalized. So start just into the system life