Friday, April 2, 2004

Meeting Topic:

System and Software Reviews Since Acquisition Reform

Presenter: Dr. Peter Hantos
Senior Engineering Specialist, The Aerospace Corporation

Abstract

The objective of this presentation is to provide tangible guidelines to acquirer organizations’ personnel for preparing for in-process software reviews. In June 1994, a Department of Defense initiative ended the use of military standards, and acquisition agencies and contractors were left with only a fluid, and often contradictory set of guidelines. Now the acquirer has to assume that the contractor has planned an appropriate process for the development of the software, and this process naturally generates all the necessary planning and engineering information. The contractor proposes the schedule, location, and contents of all joint technical and management reviews that are intended to review evolving software products.

To prepare for in-process reviews, it is necessary to understand the impact of new software development trends. This understanding serves as the basis for determining the process artifacts and work products that should be expected at a given time, and the performance and maturity considerations appropriate for those artifacts according to their position in the system life cycle. In this presentation, I analyze software development trends along several dimensions, from the artifact reviewers' point of view:

(1) Architecture
A significant trend is the recognition of the importance of architecture. Various systematic methods have emerged to define and document software architecture, replacing the earlier, functional decomposition and work breakdown structure-based approaches. Also, today’s complex systems require an appropriately matched architectural structure, hence the introduction of distributed, networked, web-based architectures, application services, and the emergence of reusable and commercially available components. The MIL-STD-1521B’s Configuration Item concept is controversial on many counts. Besides the introduction of newer, more flexible categorization of software modules, the proper documentation and presentation of the designed system’s developmental and deployment structure is needed as well. The reviewer’s special challenge is that functionally decomposed architectural components and developmental and deployment components may not always maintain a one-to-one relationship during the development life cycle.

(2) Product-Oriented Software Engineering Activities
Object-oriented (O-O), iterative, use-case driven analysis and design are replacing structured design and functional decomposition of requirements. O-O and visual programming languages are taking over from the earlier, primarily procedural programming languages. State-of-the-art methods also include the use of automated code generators and executable models. System development is now carried out through incremental integration, delivering frequent, sometimes nightly releases, and manual system testing is increasingly replaced with automated testing methods.

(3) Engineering Management Processes
Modern software development artifacts reflect the overall, heightened software awareness in systems engineering and integrated business/hardware/software process and product development concepts. Cross-functional Integrated Product Teams (IPTs) replace the earlier, hierarchical and functional organizational structure. The contractors’ development and management structure creates another system view that overlays the technical ones and poses an added level of complexity at the reviews.

(4) Integral Software Engineering Activities
Quality is not an afterthought anymore, and development organizations pursue the implementation of various Quality and Process Maturity frameworks like ISO and CMMI. The same frameworks can also serve as the basis for the contractor selection process during acquisition, so contractors have multiple reasons to achieve organic implementations of quality and risk management processes.

(5) New Hardware-Software Technologies
Major developments in hardware technology are always followed by software technology innovations; for example, multi-threaded software applications became common to exploit multi-processor hardware. Today’s database systems are fully scalable on any host, and new O-O databases are used to handle a wide variety of image, voice or video objects, beyond the classical textual records.

(6) Security
Today’s systems are designed with a high sensitivity to security issues, due to the proliferation of malicious penetration attempts, virus and denial of service attacks. The focus moves from password-level, system security to the development of security-centered architectures, trusted computer platforms with kernel level security, and the use of firewalls, honeypots, and other sophisticated solutions.

Your Presenter: Peter Hantos, PhD., joined The Aerospace Corporation in May 2003, and is currently Senior Engineering Specialist in the Software Acquisition and Process Office of the Software Engineering Subdivision in ETG/CSD. He has over 25 years of experience as a professor, researcher, software engineer and manager. He has authored numerous technical papers, U.S. and international conference presentations.

Prior to joining Aerospace, as Principal Scientist at the Xerox Corporate Software Engineering Center, he developed corporate-wide processes covering the full product development lifecycle for software-intensive systems. Other highlights of his Xerox career include the creation and management of a software technology center to facilitate the technology transfer and productization of software prototypes developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Later, as Department Manager he directed all aspects of hardware/software quality and test for several product lines.

Dr. Hantos started his career in the US as Visiting Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a Member of ACM, Senior Member of the IEEE, and holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in E.E. from the Budapest Institute of Technology, Hungary.

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