System Integration

Dedicated to the dissemination of System Integration information

My Q-Methodology Survey

About Me

I work for a large UK defence company, SELEX-SAS, as a System Integration (S.I.) engineer on Captor Radar - the radar for the EFA Typhoon fighter aircraft.  In recent times I have also worked on the S.I. of the AESA variant of Captor - ’CAESAR’ .  At the moment I am working on the S.I. of an upgrade to the first production run of Captor, it is called ‘Captor Tranche 2’. See here for a bit more about me.

 

The Surveys

The objectives of my survey are:

· Discover the factors that influence the functional partitioning of a major defence system (survey 1).

· Discover the factors that affect the subsequent the S.I. of the same system (survey 2).

I will then study the two sets of factors to investigate the link between them.

The survey is important because, at the moment, there is very little research in the subject area and even less public domain data about the influences on both functional partitioning and S.I.

I will place the results in the public domain via this web site and my dissertation.  The Open University makes all dissertations available at the ‘MaCuData’ web site.

If you take part in the survey I assure you that:

· Total confidentiality is assured.

· Your details will not be passed to any third party.

· The published data will be ‘anonymised’.

· I will act in a fair and responsible manner and comply with any reasonable request.

What I am trying to say, in case I have missed anything out, is that I am doing the research for good reasons and will act in an ethical manner.  I also want others to make use of any data I collect.

I will conduct two surveys; one that concerns the influences that affect system functional partitioning and on what affects S.I. 

Once I have completed the surveys I will study the data and attempt to produce a high level mapping between the two sets of influences.  The mapping will then be subject to peer review as part of a ‘sanity check’.

The surveys obviously have relevance to my work but I have already been warned off, by the Open University, about making the dissertation too company specific.  The dissertation will, hopefully, have relevance to many defence systems.