Sep 17
2012
By Douglas C. Schmidt
Principal Researcher
As
part of an ongoing effort to keep you informed about our latest work,
I'd like to let you know about some recently published SEI technical
reports and notes. These reports highlight the latest work of SEI
technologists in workforce competency and readiness, cyber forensics, exploratory research, acquisition, and software-reliant systems.
This post includes a listing of each report, author(s), and links where
the published reports can be accessed on the SEI website.
Read more...
Aug 27
2012
Second in a Two-Part Series
By Lisa Brownsword
Acquisition Support Program
Major acquisition
programs increasingly rely on software to provide substantial portions
of system capabilities. All too often, however, software is not
considered when the early, most constraining program decisions are
made. SEI researchers have identified misalignments between software architecture and system acquisition
strategies that lead to program restarts, cancellations, and failures
to meet important missions or business goals. This blog posting—the
second installment in a two-part series—builds on the discussions in part one
by introducing several patterns of misalignment—known as
anti-patterns—that we’ve identified in our research and discussing how
these anti-patterns
are helping us create a new method for aligning software architecture
and system acquisition strategies to reduce project failure.
Read more...
Aug 20
2012
By Don Firesmith
Researcher
Acquisition Support Program
Engineering
the architecture for a large and complex system is a hard, lengthy, and
complex undertaking. System architects must perform many tasks and use
many techniques if they are to create a sufficient set of architectural
models and related documents that are complete, consistent, correct,
unambiguous, verifiable, and both usable by and useful to the
architecture’s many stakeholders. This blog posting, the first in a
two-part series, presents the Method Framework for Engineering System Architectures (MFESA), which is a situational process engineering
framework for developing system-specific methods to engineer system
architectures. This posting provides a brief historical description of
situational method engineering, explains why no single system
architectural engineering method is adequate, and introduces MFESA by
providing a top-level overview of its components, describing its
applicability, and explaining how it simultaneously provides the
benefits of standardization and flexibility.
Read more...
Aug 13
2012
First in a Two-Part Series
By Lisa Brownsword
Acquisition Support Program
Major acquisition
programs increasingly rely on software to provide substantial portions
of system capabilities. Not surprisingly, therefore, software issues
are driving system cost and schedule overruns. All too often, however,
software is not even a consideration when the early, most constraining
program decisions are made. Through analysis of troubled programs, SEI
researchers have identified misalignments between software architecture and system acquisition strategies
that lead to program restarts, cancellations, and failures to meet
important missions or business goals. To address these misalignments,
the SEI is conducting new research on enabling organizations to reduce
program failures by harmonizing their acquisition strategy with their
software architecture. This blog posting—the first in a two-part
series—motivates the problem of misalignment and describes the SEI’s
current research for addressing this problem by analyzing
program-specific quality attributes associated with business and mission
goals.
Read more...
Jun 4
2012
By Bill Scherlis,
Chief Technology Officer (Acting)
SEI
The
extent of software in Department of Defense (DoD) systems has increased
by more than an order of magnitude every decade. This is not just
because there are more systems with more software; a similar growth
pattern has been exhibited within individual, long-lived military systems. In recognition of this growing software role, the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E, now ASD(R&E)) requested the National Research Council (NRC) to undertake a study of defense software producibility,
with the purpose of identifying the principal challenges and developing
recommendations regarding both improvement to practice and priorities
for research. The NRC appointed a committee, which I chaired, that
included many individuals well known to the SEI community, including Larry Druffel, Doug Schmidt, Robert Behler, Barry Boehm,
and others. After more than three years of effort—which included an
intensive review and revision process—we issued our final report, Critical Code: Software Producibility for Defense. In the year and a half since the report was published, I have been asked to brief it extensively to the DoD and the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) communities.
This blog posting, the first in a series, highlights several of the
committee’s key findings, specifically focusing on three areas of
identified improvements to practice—areas where the committee judged
that improvements both are feasible and could substantially help the DoD
to acquire, sustain, and assure software-reliant systems of all kinds.
Read more...
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