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...
Aug 6
2012
By Robert Stoddard,
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis Program
As
part of our research related to early acquisition lifecycle cost
estimation for the Department of Defense (DoD), my colleagues in the
SEI’s Software Engineering Measurement & Analysis initiative
and I began envisioning a potential solution that would rely heavily on
expert judgment of future possible program execution scenarios.
Previous to our work on cost estimation, many parametric cost models
required domain expert input, but, in our opinion, they did not address
alternative scenarios of execution that might occur from Milestone A onward. Our approach, known as Quantifying Uncertainty in Early Lifecycle Cost Estimation (QUELCE),
asks domain experts to provide judgment not only on uncertain cost
factors for a nominal program execution scenario, but also for the
drivers of cost factors across a set of anticipated scenarios. This blog
post describes our efforts to improve the accuracy and reliability of
expert judgment within this expanded role of early lifecycle cost estimation.
Read more...
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