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 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...
Jul 16
2012
By Douglas C. Schmidt
Principal Researcher
While
agile methods have become popular in commercial software development
organizations, the engineering disciplines needed to apply agility to
mission-critical, software-reliant systems are not as well defined or
practiced. To help bridge this gap, the SEI recently hosted the Agile Research Forum.
The event brought together researchers and practitioners from around
the world to discuss when and how to best apply agile methods in
mission-critical environments found in government and many industries.
This blog posting, the third installment in a multi-part series
highlighting research presented during the forum, summarizes a
presentation made during the forum by Ipek Ozkaya, a senior researcher in the SEI’s Research, Technology & System Solutions program, who discussed the use of agile architecture practices to manage strategic, intentional technical debt.
Read more...
Jan 23
2012
By Ipek Ozkaya
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Research, Technology, and System Solutions
Managing technical debt, which refers to the rework and degraded quality resulting from overly hasty delivery of software capabilities to users, is an increasingly critical aspect of producing cost-effective, timely, and high-quality software products. A delicate balance is needed between the desire to release new software capabilities rapidly to satisfy users and the desire to practice sound software engineering that reduces rework. A previous post described the practice of strategically managing technical debt related to software architecture, which involves deliberately postponing implementation of some architectural design choices to accelerate delivery of the system today and then rearchitecting at a later time. This blog post extends our prior post by discussing how an architecture-focused analysis approach helps manage technical debt by enabling software engineers to decide the best time to rearchitect—in other words, to pay down the technical debt.
Read more...
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