By Sarah Ahmad

​​​​​​​

The majority of products we use today rely on multiple systems that interact with each other… from the smart watch on our wrist and the car we drive to work, to the planes that safely fly us to destinations near and far. Regardless of the industry, these systems are getting smarter, growing beyond a single function, and even communicating with each other and their environments.

We are seeing a departure from systems that are developed separately, that don’t communicate with each other, and that have no sensing or reasoning capability. With today’s exponential growth in the complexity of products we are instead seeing smart, autonomous systems that deliver a smart cyber-physical experience.

So how is this complexity being added??... SOFTWARE! Software drives the innovation behind these new systems.

Amazingly, the rate of change of software is a thousand times greater than mechanical and electrical advancement. And due to the differing and more volatile rate of change, different development cultures have emerged, like agile versus sequential waterfall methods. Typically, software has been designed and developed in an entirely separate environment. And yet, software needs to be a part of every discipline of nearly every product. The need for closely integrating software development to the rest of product development is felt in almost every industry.

Software engineers no longer need to work in a disconnected development environment, with no visibility of upstream and downstream processes and governance. Instead, software engineers can connect their development to upstream enterprise governance and multi-discipline product definitions.

Connected Software is the first phase of the Dassault Systèmes journey – delivering tools for truly connected multi-discipline product management. Using connected software, you can connect and manage your software components as part of your multi-discipline product define and architecture. By connecting your software on the same platform, you have live, single source of truth traceability, and the ability to govern using a unified process.

The Software Engineer role provides users with the ability to manage software source code and build artifacts in a multi-discipline product structure for traceability and governance. It also delivers the ability to govern software in context of a multi-discipline product. When used with respective connectors, software engineers can reference software content managed in external SCM tools (e.g. GIT or DesignSync). Additionally, software engineering items can be used to define a multi-discipline architecture in rich tools like CATIA Systems Architect, and be instantiated in a mutli-discipline product release structure.

Connected Software, as part of the Dassault System solution offering, delivers functionality that allows all disciplines to work together - breaking the silos and connecting processes to truly develop a multi-discipline, holistic product, and bringing together roles and processes from different disciplines (mechanical, electrical and software). By converging historically isolated domains, we provide our customer with true end-to-end traceability and application of best practices.