May 20
2013
By Joseph Elm
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Building
a complex weapon system in today’s environment may involve many
subsystems—propulsion, hydraulics, power, controls, radar, structures,
navigation, computers, and communications. Design of these systems
requires the expertise of engineers in particular disciplines, including
mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering,
metallurgical engineering, and many others. But some activities of
system development are interdisciplinary, including requirements
development, trade studies, and architecture design, to name a few.
These tasks do not fit neatly into the traditional engineering
disciplines, and require the attention of engineering staff with broader
skills and backgrounds. This need for breadth and experience is often
met by systems engineers. Unfortunately, system engineering is often not
valued among all stakeholders in the Department of Defense (DoD), and
is often the first group of activities to be eliminated when a program
is faced with budget constraints. This blog post highlights recent research aimed at demonstrating the value of systems engineering to program managers in the DoD and elsewhere.
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May 13
2013
By Will Dormann
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
CERT
Occasionally this blog will highlight different posts from the SEI blogosphere. Today’s post by Will Dormann, a senior member of the technical staff in the SEI’s CERT Program, is from the CERT/CC (Coordination Center) blog. This post explores Dormann’s investigation into the state of signed Java applet security.
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May 6
2013
Second of a Two-Part Series
By Donald Firesmith
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Acquisition Support Program
In the first blog entry
of this two part series on common testing problems, I addressed the
fact that testing is less effective, less efficient, and more expensive
than it should be. This second posting of a two-part series
highlights results of an analysis that documents problems that commonly
occur during testing. Specifically, this series of posts identifies and
describes 77 testing problems organized into 14 categories; lists
potential symptoms by which each can be recognized; potential negative
consequences, and potential causes; and makes recommendations for
preventing them or mitigating their effects.
Read more...
Apr 29
2013
By Julien Delange
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Research, Technology, & System Solutions
Software and systems architects face many challenges when designing life- and safety-critical systems,
such as the altitude and control systems of a satellite, the auto pilot
system of a car, or the injection system of a medical infusion pump.
Architects in software and systems answer to an expanding group of
stakeholders and often must balance the need to design a stable system
with time-to-market constraints. Moreover, no matter what programming
language architects choose, they cannot design a complete system without
an appropriate tool environment that targets user requirements. A
promising tool environment is the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL), which is a modeling notation that employs both textual and graphical representations. This post, the second in a series on AADL,
provides an overview of existing AADL tools and highlights the
experience of researchers and practitioners who are developing and
applying AADL tools to production projects.
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Apr 22
2013
By Douglas C. Schmidt
Principal Researcher
As
part of an ongoing effort to keep you informed about our latest work, I
would like to let you know about some recently published SEI technical
reports and notes. These reports highlight the latest work of SEI
technologists in quantifying expert judgment, insider threat, detecting and preventing data exfiltration, and developing a common vocabulary for malware analysts.
This post includes a listing of each report, author(s), and links where
the published reports can be accessed on the SEI website.
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Apr 15
2013
By Grace Lewis
Technical Lead
Edge-Enabled Tactical Systems Research
In 2009, a popular blogger published a post entitled “SOA is Dead,” which generated extensive commentary among those who work in the field of service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Many practitioners in this field completely misinterpreted the post;
some read the title and just assumed that the content referenced the
demise of SOA. Quite the opposite, the post was inviting people to stop
thinking about SOA as a set of technologies and start embracing SOA as
an approach for designing, developing, and managing distributed systems
that goes beyond just the technology. Unfortunately, even though SOA is
still alive and widely adopted, a belief still persists that SOA can be
purchased off the shelf. This post highlights recent research aimed
at clarifying this misperception for architects, as well as identifying
the elements that constitute a service-oriented system and the
relationships between these elements.
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Apr 5
2013
First of a Two-Part Series
By Donald Firesmith
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Acquisition Support Program
A widely cited study for the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST)
reports that inadequate testing methods and tools annually cost the
U.S. economy between $22.2 and $59.5 billion, with roughly half of these
costs borne by software developers in the form of extra testing and
half by software users in the form of failure avoidance and mitigation
efforts. The same study notes that between 25 and 90 percent of software
development budgets are often spent on testing. This posting, the first
in a two-part series, highlights results of an analysis that documents
problems that commonly occur during testing. Specifically, this series
of posts identifies and describes 77 testing problems organized into 14
categories, lists potential symptoms by which each can be recognized,
potential negative consequences, potential causes, and makes
recommendations for preventing them or mitigating their effects.
Read more...
Apr 1
2013
By Douglas C. Schmidt
Principal Researcher
In
launching the SEI blog two years ago, one of our top priorities was to
advance the scope and impact of SEI research and development projects,
while increasing the visibility of the work by SEI technologists who
staff these projects. After 114 posts, and 72,608 visits from readers of
our blog, this post reflects on some highlights from the last two years
and gives our readers a preview of posts to come.
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