Latest Podcasts

Reliability Validation and Improvement Framework

May 23, 2013

Peter Feiler

Peter Feiler

"When you look at the problem, what we have done is identified four areas that are contributors to making a system that is heavily reliant on software of higher quality."

Categories:

Software Architecture

The Business Case for Systems Engineering

May 09, 2013

Joseph Elm

Joseph Elm

"The purpose of this research was to develop the quantitative evidence that would convince the skeptics of the value of systems engineering."

Applying Agile in the Department of Defense

April 18, 2013

Mary Ann Lapham

Mary Ann Lapham

Suzanne Miller

Suzanne Miller

"One of the things that we found with DoD and federal clients is that these principles are a little bit new. Some of them feel good—they feel like they fit within the DoD culture—and some of them don’t."

Categories:

Acquisition Support

The Evolution of a Science Project

April 04, 2013

Andrew P. Moore

Andrew P. Moore

William Novak

William Novak

"When the project first starts out, initially we’re ticking off progress at a pretty regular basis…but what can happen as you start nearing completion—the 70, 80, 90 percent done—is that progress as measured can begin to stall out. "

Categories:

Acquisition Support

What's New With Version 2 of the AADL Standard?

March 21, 2013

Peter Feiler

Peter Feiler

"Today almost everything is software intensive. If you have a car or an aircraft, they don’t work anymore if the software doesn’t work. "

Categories:

Software Architecture

The State of the Practice of Cyber Intelligence

March 07, 2013

Jay McAllister

Jay McAllister

Troy Townsend

Troy Townsend

"I think it’s becoming really important because 'cyber' transcends every aspect of business, whether you’re doing human resources or business intelligence or physical security."

Technology Readiness Assessments

February 21, 2013

Michael Bandor

Michael Bandor

"A TRA is not a documentation review. There’s a lot of planning that goes into it, six months to a year’s worth of planning out front. You actually get into design details, engineering studies, & test reports. It’s really a heavy-duty engineering level review. "

Categories:

Acquisition Support

Standards in Cloud Computing Interoperability

February 07, 2013

Grace Lewis

Grace Lewis

"The biggest fear is really vendor lock-in. People want to have the freedom to move from one cloud provider to another in case the relationship between them isn’t working, service-level agreements aren’t being met, other providers have better prices, or even if their provider goes out of business, which is not unusual in today’s world. If there aren’t standards, then moving between providers could be very difficult. "

The Latest Developments in AADL

January 17, 2013

Peter Feiler

Peter Feiler

Julien Delange

Julien Delange

"When people do the system-safety analysis, they are focused on the physical parts failing, and they understand that part. But the consequence of that in software today is still not very well understood. "

The Fundamentals of Agile

January 03, 2013

Tim Chick

Tim Chick

"Some people I've talked to, they really love agile. They love the techniques. And it's working really well for their team, for their project, but they are really having a hard time getting other projects in the organization to be just as successful as they are. That really is the key."

Categories:

TSP

Software for Soldiers who use Smartphones

December 20, 2012

Edwin Morris

Edwin Morris

"Now imagine you're walking into a village in Afghanistan. There may be some people that you or your colleagues have made contact with before that you know are friendly. It would be very useful to know about those people. In addition, it would be very useful to know about where there are potential threats. "

Architecting Service-Oriented Systems

December 06, 2012

Grace Lewis

Grace Lewis

"If you make an architectural decision that promotes interoperability or modifiability, this can have a negative impact on other qualities such as availability, reliability, security, or performance. Making these trade-offs is one of the hardest parts of architecting and designing any system. "

The SEI Strategic Plan

November 15, 2012

Bill Scherlis

Bill Scherlis

"The idea is to be able to develop highly capable, rapidly evolving, innovative systems, but to do so in a way where the risk of completion of projects is within the bounds of acceptability for major systems developments. "

Categories:

Software Assurance

Quantifying Uncertainty in Early Lifecycle Cost Estimation

November 01, 2012

Jim McCurley

Jim McCurley

Robert Stoddard

Robert Stoddard

"We needed a radically new method to address the type of information that is present that early in the lifecycle. "

Architecting a Financial System with TSP

October 18, 2012

Felix Bachmann

Felix Bachmann

Jim McHale

Jim McHale

"We did not have any evidence, any clear evidence, that they actually would work together. It was just driven by the necessity to help that customer."

Categories:

Software Architecture, TSP

The Importance of Data Quality

October 04, 2012

Dave Zubrow

Dave Zubrow

"It's always going to cost you more to fix it after the fact, and it’s very hard to go back to the point of origin and correct data once it’s entered the system. Now, our specific research last year was to investigate the use of some statistical techniques, primarily associated with outlier detection. "

Misaligned Incentives

September 20, 2012

Bill Novak

Bill Novak

"Misaligned incentives usually occur in the absence of well-designed rules that control the rewards or penalties for participants. The underlying idea is that unless the rules incentivize them to do otherwise, people and organizations both tend to act in their own self interest, which may not always be what was wanted."

Categories:

Acquisition Support

Cloud Computing for the Battlefield

September 04, 2012

Grace A. Lewis

Grace A. Lewis

"In essence cloudlets are localized, lightweight servers, very lightweight, that are running one or more virtual machines. The idea is that soldiers can offload expensive computations from their handheld mobile devices onto these virtual machines. "

An Architecture-Focused Measurement Framework for Managing Technical Debt

September 04, 2012

Ipek Ozkaya

Ipek Ozkaya

"Of course the other big question is, do we really need to go into a quantifiable aspect of debt, or is it good enough to just state in the metaphor realm? I tend to believe that if we can't measure it, we can't control it."

Categories:

Software Architecture

Agile Acquisition

September 04, 2012

Mary Ann Lapham

Mary Ann Lapham

Suzanne Miller

Suzanne Miller

"Today the Department of Defense needs to acquire software faster than it ever has in the past. "

Categories:

Acquisition Support

How a Disciplined Process Enhances & Enables Agility

September 04, 2012

Bill Nichols

Bill Nichols

"The biggest problem today is software is getting bigger and bigger. The big question naturally is how do you scale? How do you make this work for larger organizations, for larger project sizes? Things that work within a small team, with people that can talk face-to-face, don't necessarily scale when you go to bigger projects."

Categories:

TSP

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