Apr 15
2013
By Grace Lewis
Technical Lead
Edge-Enabled Tactical Systems Research
In 2009, a popular blogger published a post entitled “SOA is Dead,” which generated extensive commentary among those who work in the field of service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Many practitioners in this field completely misinterpreted the post;
some read the title and just assumed that the content referenced the
demise of SOA. Quite the opposite, the post was inviting people to stop
thinking about SOA as a set of technologies and start embracing SOA as
an approach for designing, developing, and managing distributed systems
that goes beyond just the technology. Unfortunately, even though SOA is
still alive and widely adopted, a belief still persists that SOA can be
purchased off the shelf. This post highlights recent research aimed
at clarifying this misperception for architects, as well as identifying
the elements that constitute a service-oriented system and the
relationships between these elements.
Read more...
Apr 5
2013
First of a Two-Part Series
By Donald Firesmith
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Acquisition Support Program
A widely cited study for the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST)
reports that inadequate testing methods and tools annually cost the
U.S. economy between $22.2 and $59.5 billion, with roughly half of these
costs borne by software developers in the form of extra testing and
half by software users in the form of failure avoidance and mitigation
efforts. The same study notes that between 25 and 90 percent of software
development budgets are often spent on testing. This posting, the first
in a two-part series, highlights results of an analysis that documents
problems that commonly occur during testing. Specifically, this series
of posts identifies and describes 77 testing problems organized into 14
categories, lists potential symptoms by which each can be recognized,
potential negative consequences, potential causes, and makes
recommendations for preventing them or mitigating their effects.
Read more...
Apr 1
2013
By Douglas C. Schmidt
Principal Researcher
In
launching the SEI blog two years ago, one of our top priorities was to
advance the scope and impact of SEI research and development projects,
while increasing the visibility of the work by SEI technologists who
staff these projects. After 114 posts, and 72,608 visits from readers of
our blog, this post reflects on some highlights from the last two years
and gives our readers a preview of posts to come.
Read more...
Mar 25
2013
By David Svoboda
CERT Secure Coding Team
This
blog post describes a research initiative aimed at eliminating
vulnerabilities resulting from memory management problems in C and C++.
Memory problems in C and C++ can lead to serious software
vulnerabilities including difficulty fixing bugs, performance
impediments, program crashes (including null pointer deference and out-of-memory errors), and remote code execution.
Read more...
Mar 18
2013
Second in a Series on Readiness Fit Analysis for Adoption of Agile Methods
By Suzanne Miller
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Acquisition Support Program
The adoption of new practices, such as agile
or any new practice for that matter, is a task that is best undertaken
with both eyes open. There are often disconnects between the adopting
organization’s current practice and culture and the new practices being
adopted. This posting is the second installment in a series on Readiness & Fit Analysis (RFA),
which is a model and method for understanding risks when contemplating
or embarking on the adoption of new practices, in this case agile
methods. The RFA method helps organizations understand the barriers and
enablers to successful adoption that are present when an analysis is
performed. The first post in this series outlined the principles of RFA and described the Acquisition Support Program’s
work in extending RFA to support profiling and adoption risk
identification to organizations that are adopting agile methods. This
blog post continues the discussion with a more in-depth dive into one
more of the six RFA categories that we have identified.
Read more...
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