In an effort to establish interface standards to help the U.S. Navy more easily and effectively assemble software-intensive Project Support Environments (PSEs) from commercial sources, the Navy's Next Generation Computer Resources (NGCR) program has set up a Project Support Environment Standards Working Group (PSESWG). The foundation of this group's work is the development of a service-based reference model that will provide context for categorizing and relating existing standards and the identification of interface areas that may benefit from future standardization. This paper presents a report on the lessons learned in the definition and use of this reference model.
Various reference models have been proposed for the classification of features present in an integrated software engineering environment. In this paper, two such models, the NIST/ECMA frameworks reference model and the Project Support Environment reference model, are studied and a target system is mapped to the set of services present in these models. The results of this mapping and comments on the effectiveness of the models are given.
The development of gigabit-rate digital transmission methods is being viewed as a precursor to the gradual merging of the cable television, information technology and telephone industries into a heterogeneous set of information technology providers. This concept has been thought of as the national information infrastructure (NII) or more colloquially as the "information superhighway." This paper presents a model of the information technology aspects of an organization that may be used to model and understand the various roles that different organizations may play in developing this national information delivery channel. This model is called the Information Technology Engineering and Measurement (ITEM) Model and this paper describes the model and several applications of its use.
There is considerable interest today in designing open systems that permit tools to be moved freely among various environments on different hardware platforms. In order to develop such systems, terms like open systems, and features for open systems like interoperability, and integration must all be precisely defined. This paper presents a model that is an extension of a service-based reference model for development environments which can be used to formally define these and other related concepts.
The Information Technology Engineering and Measurement (ITEM) Model has been developed to describe the information processing activities of an enterprise, both the automated tasks performed by computer and the manual processes performed by the information technology staff of an organization. In this paper the ITEM model is applied to the description of software engineering environments as extensions to two previously developed reference models, the NIST/ ECMA framework (i.e., toaster) model and the Project Support Environment reference model. The ability to measure the degree of automation within a process, the ability to define the complexity of a process, and the ability to measure technology transition via a concept called technological drift are all metrics that can evolve from this model.
Environment research has often centered on either the set of tools needed to support software development or on the set of process steps followed by personnel on a project as they complete their activities. In this paper, we address the effects that the environment has on the development process in order to complete a project. In particular, we are interested in how software process steps are actually performed using a typical programming environment. We then introduce a model to measure a software engineering process in order to be able to determine the relative tradeoffs among manual process steps and automated environmental tools. Understanding process complexity is a potential result of this model. Data from the Flight Dynamics Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is used to understand these issues.
Last Change: December 18, 1996