Reducing uncertainty in Systems Engineering through Defence Experimentation

Defence Experimentation (DE) is becoming adopted in Defence as a means to improve requirements elicitation, especially in capability development. However there is currently no established method for predicting the effort required in DE. This paper makes some first steps to address this, by carefully surveying the benefits of DE to the Systems Engineering process, the different needs of DE and the nature of the simulation methods and tools involved. It then surveys the literature on forecasting and prediction, with particular attention to methods from software engineering, where the problem has been tackled with some success. A parametric modelling approach to DE effort prediction is proposed.