By Douglas C. Schmidt
Chief Technology Officer

A key mission of the SEI is to advance the practice of software engineering and cyber security through research and technology transition to ensure the development and operation of software-reliant Department of Defense (DoD) systems with predictable and improved quality, schedule, and cost. To achieve this mission, the SEI conducts research and development (R&D) activities involving the DoD, federal agencies, industry, and academia. One of my initial blog postings summarized the new and upcoming R&D activities we had planned for 2011. Now that the year is nearly over, this blog posting presents some of the many R&D accomplishments we completed in 2011.

Read more...

Part 1: Software Sustainment Trends and Challenges
By Douglas C. Schmidt,
Deputy Director, Research, and Chief Technology Officer

Department of Defense (DoD) programs have traditionally focused on the software acquisition phase (initial procurement, development, production, and deployment) and largely discounted the software sustainment phase (operations and support) until late in the lifecycle.  The costs of software sustainment are becoming too high to discount since they account for 60 to 90 percent of the total software lifecycle effort. Moreover, in an era where DoD new-start programs are being reduced in favor of prolonging legacy systems, significant software sustainment cost increases are themselves unsustainable. The growing expense and prolonging of legacy systems motivates the need for greater discipline and attention on defining and applying appropriate methods and technologies to improve sustainment capabilities and efficiencies.  This SEI blog posting—the first in a two part series—summarizes key software sustainment challenges faced by DoD; the subsequent post describes R&D activities conducted by the SEI to address some of these challenges.

Read more...

By Robert Ferguson
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Software Engineering Process Management Program

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has frequently cited poor cost estimation as one of the reasons for cost overrun problems in acquisition programs. Software is often a major culprit. One study on cost estimation by the Naval Postgraduate School found a 34 percent median value increase of software size over the estimate.  Cost overruns lead to painful Congressional scrutiny, and an overrun in one program often cascades and leads to the depletion of funds from others. The challenges encountered in estimating software cost were described in the first post of this two-part series on improving the accuracy of early cost estimates.  This post describes new tools and methods we are developing at the SEI to help cost estimation experts get the right information they need into a familiar and usable form for producing high quality cost estimates early in the life cycle.

Read more...

By Robert Ferguson
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Software Engineering Process Management Program

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has frequently cited poor cost estimation as one of the reasons for cost overrun problems in acquisition programs. Software is often a major culprit. One study on cost estimation by the Naval Postgraduate School found a 34 percent median value increase of software size over the estimate.  Cost overruns lead to painful Congressional scrutiny, and an overrun in one program often leads to the depletion of funds from another.  This post, the first in a series on improving the accuracy of early cost estimates, describes challenges we have observed trying to accurately estimate software effort and cost in Department of Defense (DOD) acquisition programs, as well as other product development organizations.

Read more...