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Being Your Own Boss—Part V: Building Trust
This fifth and final column on being your own boss describes how to take control of your own work. It covers the key issues you will face, the fears you must overcome, and the self-confidence and credibility you must build. While the challenge of doing all of this may seem daunting, and while it does take personal courage, it isn’t really that difficult. The key is to be willing and able to take responsibility for your commitments. While you can take all of these steps by yourself, it helps to have teammates to work with you. Once you know how to manage yourself, however, you will not want to work any other way.
User Network for Software Architecture Technology Is Growing Steadily
In its three-year history, the Software Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) Workshop series has attracted software and systems engineering practitioners throughout government and industry from all over the world. Because of the workshop’s emphasis on software architecture practices, participant interaction, information exchange, and addressing the needs of practitioners, attendance continues to grow each year.
SATURN 2008, which will take place n Pittsburgh, Pa., from April 28 to May 1, will address:
- architecture-centric system evolution
- evaluating architectures of software-intensive systems
- architecture and technical trends
- improving software architecture practices within an organization
SATURN 2008 is the leading forum for engineers, architects, technical managers, and product managers who work with or have a stake in software architecture practices. The workshop provides a venue for practitioners to reflect on the achievements made, assess the current state of the field, and identify key challenges still facing researchers and practitioners.
Tackling the Growing Botnet Threat
A botnet is made up of compromised hosts, which are commonly referred to as bots or zombies. Botnets are collections of compromised hosts, centrally managed, or managed from multiple points, but they’re logging into a location that’s easily manageable.
It’s hard to say with absolute certainty why botnets are ongoing and rising. The simple fact is the code is out there, it’s very easy to use, and if anybody has any questions, there’s free support on the Internet to assist in trying to get botnets to run, operate, or exploit vulnerable machines.
This column is based on a podcast recorded with Nick Ianelli and posted to CERT’s Podcast Series: Security for Business Leaders. Nick Ianelli is a member of the CERT Coordination Center, conducting artifact analysis on malicious code. Julia Allen, who interviewed him, manages CERT’s Podcast Series and conducts research in security governance and software assurance.
CMMI with Agile, Lean, Six Sigma, and Everything Else
I repeatedly encounter those seeking the one solution that will solve the problems in their organization. Such a search is often commissioned by a boss who wants the single answer and a quick fix to the organization’s problems. In this column, I describe how to relate some of these answers rather than trying to make any of them—even CMMI—a single solution.
The Double Challenge in Engineering Complex Systems of Systems
Traditional software engineering practices were defined when development was largely controlled by organizations that could set relatively stable requirements, build to those requirements, and deliver a system to the customer. More recently, increasingly complex and dynamic customer demands have focused attention on coordinating activities of multiple organizations and systems within an enterprise to perform a number of tasks or deliver tailored responses. This change in focus from a specific delivered system to the need for flexible capabilities is reflected in product lines, families of systems, and other recent advances in software engineering practices.
However, to meet customer expectations with the emerging, complex systems of systems required to support integrated military strategies, homeland security responses, and nationwide health information networks, system developers must meet a double challenge—a governance challenge of collaborating with an increasing number and diversity of enterprises and an agility challenge of providing situation-appropriate responses in changing situations.
In response to the double challenge, the SEI is developing the System-of-Systems NavigatorSM, an integrated set of principles, tools, models, techniques, and improvement cycle activities.
Resources for Getting Started with Software Product Lines
The purpose of the SEI’s Product Line Practice initiative is to make software product line development and acquisition a low-risk, high-return proposition for all organizations. Organizations of all sizes, government and commercial, are achieving order-of-magnitude improvements in cost, quality, and time to market using the software product line approach—improvements the scale of which the field has not seen since the advent of high-level programming languages decades ago.
The Product Line Practice initiative has a broad selection of products and services available to help organizations cross barriers and hurdles between their current state and the successful development of a software product line. The initiative has just added a new resource to this selection: The SEI has recently compiled a catalog of 42 examples of software product lines that have been described in the open scientific literature.