Top Ten Git Commands for Systems Engineering Digital Artifacts Authors and Analysts

Systems engineering trends show an increasing importance of applying version control to all engineering artifacts, and a need to synchronize artifact updates with design decisions. Leveraging available technologies, such as Git, has the potential to enhance version control and integration among cross-functional teams and their associated artifacts. Orchestration is only possible when cross-functional teams have the same baseline of knowledge in understanding Git functionality. This paper presents a selection of ten Git commands used by systems engineering digital artifacts authors and analysts collaborating within in a digital engineering ecosystem. Application to a use case of systems engineering, as authors, and systems safety, as analysts, aims to ensure needed end-to-end process from an end-user perspective. Commands described in this paper can be utilized by any artifact consumers, reviewers, or contributors such as human factors engineering, reliability, cybersecurity, testability or any other '-ilities' in the lifecycle properties of engineering systems domain. Furthermore, the paper discusses the benefits of version control systems centered on achieving early gap identification for systems integration and verification while maintaining design, development, assessment continuity, temporal tracking of engineering artifacts to support evidence quality, managing digital artifacts complexity, building a digital thread, and achieving curated data display to audiences.