CBS Products and Services
The SEI CBS Initiative can provide a range of products and services to government and commercial organizations. Major categories of services include:
- Briefings, Courses and Workshops
- COTS Usage Risk Evaluation
- Evolutionary Process for Integrating COTS-Based Systems
- Program Management and Policy Guidance
Briefings, Courses, and Workshops
The SEI CBS Initiative has developed a number of briefings, courses, and workshops to assist organizations undertaking COTS-Based and Open System development efforts. Offerings available include:
- Building Systems from Commercial Components - Tutorial
- CBS for Executives - Briefing
- Modernizing Legacy Systems - Tutorial
- Open Systems for Executives - Briefing
- Open Systems: Promises and Pitfalls
- Technology Evaluation Tutorial
If you are interested in learning more about these offerings, or wish to have additional briefings, courses, or workshops developed, contact us at cbs-products@sei.cmu.edu.
COTS Usage Risk Evaluation
When you acquire a COTS product for implementation, you take on risks and challenges not present in with non-COTS products. The COTS Usage Risk Evaluation (CURE) assesses and mitigates your organization's risk, specifically regarding COTS related issues. It's best to engage CURE as a front-end analysis tool, before you acquire the COTS product. It's also useful as an overall improvement tool that raises your organization's awareness of COTS-related risk areas. CURE can be applied to both the acquirer and contractor sides of a project.
CURE emerged from the SEI's experience consulting with programs in trouble in their attempt to implement heavy use of COTS products. Investigating the source of the trouble repeatedly involved asking particular questions. These evolved into a detailed questionnaire that is the major instrument in the CURE process. The questionnaire is targeted to the decision makers within a specific program or project, and sent to them for completion a month before the CURE team's on-site visit. During the visit itself, the evaluation team continues "digging," through in-depth interviews with personnel to analyze key topics. Following the visit, the team produces an evaluation report that concisely states the risk and details a review of the team's analysis, the submitted information that led to the analysis, the assessed criticality of the risk, and potential mitigations. The team can also provide optional follow-up visit to reassess high-priority risks, assess the impact of program changes and identify new areas of risk.
Detailed information about CURE can be found in the SEI technical report Identifying COTS Product Risks: The COTS Usage Risk Evaluation.
You can access an information sheet for a quick overview. If you are interested in learning more about CURE, please contact us at: cure@sei.cmu.edu.
Evolutionary Process for Integrating COTS-Based Systems
The Evolutionary Process for Integrating COTS-based systems (EPIC) extends the Rational Unified Process (RUP) to accommodate COTS-based system development. EPIC shares the RUP principles that a development process must be risk and use-case driven, architecture centric, iterative, and incremental. EPIC accomplishes this through concurrent discovery and negotiation of stakeholder needs and business processes; applicable technology and components; the architecture and design; and the programmatics and risk across four RUP phases of inception, elaboration, construction, and transition. EPIC provides a structured flow of activities and artifacts that keeps the four spheres fluid and balanced as the project evolves from a strategic vision to an implemented and sustained solution. In EPIC, a solution is composed of the integration of one or more COTS products with any legacy or other reuse components, any required custom code (including wrappers and "glue"), and any changes to end-user business processes necessary to match the capabilities of the COTS products.
For additional reading, see the comprehensive technical report about EPIC or a detailed product sheet. For a more extensive explanation click here.
Program Management and Policy Guidance
Many organizations have decided on a CBS strategy, but are unsure of how to manage the changing approaches to acquisition management and contracts, design and engineering, test and evaluation, and product support represented by COTS-based system development. The SEI CBS Initiative continues to accumulate information regarding best practices for the management of COTS-based systems acquisitions, and can assist organizations in developing program management strategies. Some of this information is available in CBS for Program Managers (Briefing) and other SEI CBS courses. Additional information is being gathered and organized as "drill downs" that expand on topics identified in these courses.
In addition, sustaining momentum toward a CBS approach within an organization requires more than just opportunistic use of isolated COTS components. An organizational capability to perform analysis of alternate designs and implementation strategies, and to make reasoned decisions regarding tradeoffs between the alternatives is also necessary. The SEI CBS Initiative can provide assistance in developing the policies and plans supporting this organizational capability.
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