Software Engineering Institute

About: Software Engineering Institute is a facility organization based out in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Software development & Software system. The organization has 1035 authors who have published 1507 publications receiving 50667 citations.

Software Architecture in Practice

Abstract: From the Book: Our goals for the first edition were threefold. First, we wanted to show through authentic case studies actual examples of software architectures solving real-world problems. Second, we wanted to establish and show the strong connection between an architecture and an organization's business goals. And third, we wanted to explain the importance of software architecture in achieving the quality goals for a system. Our goals for this second edition are the same, but the passage of time since the writing of the first edition has brought new developments in the field and new understanding of the important underpinnings of software architecture. We reflect the new developments with new case studies and the new understanding both through new chapters and through additions to and elaboration of the existing chapters. Architecture analysis, design, reconstruction, and documentation have all had major developments since the first edition. Architecture analysis has developed into a mature field with industrial-strength methods. This is reflected by a new chapter about the architecture tradeoff analysis method (ATAM). The ATAM has been adopted by industrial organizations as a technique for evaluating their software architectures. Architecture design has also had major developments since the first edition. The capturing of quality requirements, the achievement of those requirements through small-scale and large-scale architectural approaches (tactics and patterns, respectively), and a design method that reflects knowledge of how to achieve qualities are all captured in various chapters. Three new chapters treat understanding quality requirements, achieving qualities, and theattribute driven design (ADD) method, respectively. Architecture reconstruction or reverse engineering is an essential activity for capturing undocumented architectures. It can be used as a portion of a design project, an analysis project, or to provide input into a decision process to determine what to use as a basis for reconstructing an existing system. In the first edition, we briefly mentioned a tool set (Dali) and its uses in the re-engineering context; in in this edition the topic merits its own chapter. Documenting software architectures is another topic that has matured considerably in the recent past. When the first edition was published, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) was just arriving on the scene. Now it is firmly entrenched, a reality reflected by all-new diagrams. But more important, an understanding of what kind of information to capture about an architecture, beyond what notation to use, has emerged. A new chapter covers architecture documentation. The understanding of the application of software architecture to enable organizations to efficiently produce a variety of systems based on a single architecture is summarized in a totally rewritten chapter on software product lines. The chapter reinforces the link between architecture and an organization's business goals, as product lines, based around a software architecture, can enable order-of-magnitude improvements in cost, quality, and time to market. In addition to the architectural developments, the technology for constructing distributed and Web-based systems has become prominent in today's economy. We reflect this trend by updating the World Wide Web chapter, by using Web-based examples for the ATAM chapter and the chapter on building systems from components, by replacing the CORBA case study with one on Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), and by introducing a case study on a wireless EJB system designed to support wearable computers for maintenance technicians. Finally, we have added a chapter that looks more closely at the financial aspects of architectures. There we introduce a method--the CBAM--for basing architectural decisions on economic criteria, in addition to the technical criteria that we had focused on previously. As in the first edition, we use the architecture business cycle as a unifying motif and all of the case studies are described in terms of the quality goals that motivated the system design and how the architecture for the system achieves those quality goals. In this edition, as in the first, we were very aware that our primary audience is practitioners, so we focus on presenting material that has been found useful in many industrial applications, as well as what we expect practice to be in the near future. We hope that you enjoy reading it at least as much as we enjoyed writing it. 0321154959P12162002

A sense of self for Unix processes

Abstract: A method for anomaly detection is introduced in which ``normal'' is defined by short-range correlations in a process' system calls. Initial experiments suggest that the definition is stable during normal behavior for standard UNIX programs. Further, it is able to detect several common intrusions involving sendmail and lpr. This work is part of a research program aimed at building computer security systems that incorporate the mechanisms and algorithms used by natural immune systems.

Process modeling

Abstract: • Business process reengineering-the redesign of an organization's business processes to make them more efficient. • Coordination technology-an aid to managing dependencies among the agents within a business process, and provides automated support for the most routinized component processes. * Process-driven software development environments-an automated system for integrating the work of all software related management and staff; it provides embedded support for an orderly and defined software development process. These three applications share a growing requirement to represent the processes through which work is accomplished. To the extent that automation is involved, process representation becomes a vital issue in redesigning work and allocating responsibilities between humans and computers. This requirement reflects the growing use of distributed , networked systems to link the interacting agents responsible for executing a business process. To establish process modeling as a unique area, researchers must identify conceptual boundaries that distinguish their work from model-ing in other areas of information science. Process modeling is distinguished from other types of model-ing in computer science because many of the phenomena modeled must be enacted by a human rather than a machine. At least some mod-eling, however, in the area of human-machine system integration or information systems design has this 'human-executable' attribute. Rather than focusing solely on the user's behavior at the interface or the flow and transformation of data within the system, process model-ing also focuses on interacting behaviors among agents, regardless of whether a computer is involved in the transactions. Much of the research on process modeling has been conducted on software development organizations , since the software engineering community is already accustomed to formal modeling. Software process modeling, in particular , explicitly focuses on phenomena that occur during software creation and evolution, a domain different from that usually mod-eled in human-machine integration or information systems design. Software development is a challenging focus for process modeling because of the creative problem-solving involved in requirements analysis and design, and the coordination of team interactions during the development of a complex intellectual artifact. In this article, software process modeling will be used as an example application for describing the current status of process modeling, issues for practical use, and the research questions that remain ahead. Most software organizations possess several yards of software life cycle description, enough to wrap endlessly around the walls of project rooms. Often these descriptions do not correspond to the processes actually performed during software …

Capability maturity model, version 1.1

Abstract: The capability maturity model (CMM), developed to present sets of recommended practices in a number of key process areas that have been shown to enhance software-development and maintenance capability, is discussed. The CMM was designed to help developers select process-improvement strategies by determining their current process maturity and identifying the issues most critical to improving their software quality and process. The initial release of the CMM, version 1.0, was reviewed and used by the software community during 1991 and 1992. A workshop on CMM 1.0, held in April 1992, was attended by about 200 software professionals. The current version of the CMM is the result of the feedback from that workshop and ongoing feedback from the software community. The technical report that describes version 1.1. is summarised. >

Requirements engineering paper classification and evaluation criteria: a proposal and a discussion

Abstract: In recent years, members of the steering committee of the IEEE Requirements Engineering (RE) Conference have discussed paper classification and evaluation criteria for RE papers. The immediate trigger for this discussion was our concern about differences in opinion that sometimes arise in program committees about the criteria to be used in evaluating papers. If program committee members do not all use the same criteria, or if they use criteria different from those used by authors, then papers might be rejected or accepted for the wrong reasons. Surely not all papers should be evaluated according to the same criteria. Some papers describe new techniques but do not report on empirical research; others describe new conceptual frameworks for investigating certain RE problems; others report on industrial experience with existing RE techniques. Other kinds of papers can also be easily recognized. All of these types of papers should be evaluated according to different criteria. But we are far from a consensus about what classes of paper we should distinguish, and what the criteria are for each of these classes.