Oct 15
2012
By Kurt Wallnau
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Research, Technology, and System Solutions and CERT Science of Cyber-Security
For more than 10 years, scientists, researchers, and engineers used the TeraGrid supercomputer network funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)
to conduct advanced computational science. The SEI has joined a
partnership of 17 organizations and helped develop the successor to the
TeraGrid called the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).
This posting, which is the first in a multi-part series, describes our
work on XSEDE that allows researchers open access—directly from their
desktops—to the suite of advanced computational tools and digital
resources and services provided via XSEDE. This series is not so much
concerned with supercomputers and supercomputing middleware, but rather
with the nature of software engineering practice at the scale of
socio-technical ecosystem.
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Oct 8
2012
By Suzanne Miller,
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Acquisition Support Program
All
software engineering and management practices are based on cultural and
social assumptions. When adopting new practices, leaders often find
mismatches between those assumptions and the realities within their
organizations. The SEI has an analysis method called Readiness and Fit
Analysis (RFA) that allows the profiling of a set of practices to
understand their cultural assumptions and then to use the profile to
support an organization in understanding its fit with the practices’
cultural assumptions. RFA has been used for multiple technologies and
sets of practices, most notably for adoption of CMMI practices. The method for using RFA and the profile that supports CMMI for Development adoption is found in Chapter 12 of CMMI Survival Guide: Just Enough Process Improvement. This blog post discusses a brief summary of the principles behind RFA and describes the SEI Acquisition Support Program’s
work in extending RFA to support profiling and adoption risk
identification for Department of Defense (DoD) and other
highly-regulated organizations that are considering or are in the middle
of adopting agile methods.
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Mar 26
2012
By Mike Phillips
Principal Researcher
Acquisition Support Program
In my preceding blog post, I promised to provide more examples highlighting the importance of software sustainment in the US Department of Defense (DoD). My focus is on certain configurations of weapons systems that are no longer in production for the United States Air Force, but are expected to remain a key component of our defense capability for decades to come, and thus software upgrade cycles need to refresh capabilities every 18 to 24 months. Throughout this series on efficient and effective software sustainment, I will highlight examples from each branch of the military. This second blog post describes effective sustainment engineering efforts in the Air Force, using examples from across the service’s Air Logistics Centers (ALCs).
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Feb 27
2012
By Mike Phillips
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Acquisition Support Program
Our SEI blog has included thoughtful discussions about sustaining software, such as the two-part post “The Growing Importance of Sustaining Software for the DoD.”
Software sustainment is growing in importance as the lifetimes of
hardware systems greatly exceed the normal lifetime of software systems
they are partnered with, as well as when system functionality
increasingly depends on software elements. This blog post—the first in a
multi-part series—provides specific examples of the importance of software sustainment in the Department of Defense (DoD),
where software upgrade cycles need to refresh capabilities every 18 to
24 months on weapon systems that have been out of production for many
years, but are expected to maintain defense capability for decades.
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Feb 20
2012
By Dave Zubrow, Manager
Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis Initiative
The SEI has been actively engaged in defining and studying high maturity software engineering practices for several years. Levels 4 and 5 of the CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration)
are considered high maturity and are predominantly characterized by
quantitative improvement. This blog posting briefly discusses high
maturity and highlights several recent works in the area of high
maturity measurement and analysis, motivated in part by a recent comment on a Jan. 30 post
asking about the latest research in this area. I’ve also included links
where the published research can be accessed on the SEI website.
Read more...
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