I decided to start trying to write a few quick posts that might be of interest. These posts could be news items, or in today’s case, the notification of the release of a new issue of CrossTalk; items I found interesting and wanted too draw the reader’s attention to. For those unfamiliar with CrossTalk, it is published monthly by the U.S. Air Force’s Ogden Air Logistics Center (OO-ALC), out at the Hill Air Force Base, Utah. The journal’s mission is to “encourage the engineering development of software in order to improve the reliability, sustainability, and responsiveness of our warfighting capability and to inform and educate readers on up-to-date policy decisions and new software engineering technologies.” I am not so much interested in the warfighting, but the “up-to-date policy decisions and new software engineering technologies.” What I also really appreciate is that OO-ALC publishes CrossTalk and makes the articles freely available to the public. If you prefer hard copy, you can even subscribe to the journal and have a printed version sent to you. Government operating in an open manner. I have respect for that.
Here is the table of content for the March 2008 issue of CrossTalk:
| NAVAIR’s Coast-to-Coast Support of the E-2C Hawkeye Using Distributed TSP by Linda Lou Crosby and Jeff Schwalb This article discusses a Naval Air Systems Command distributed team that became an example of how projects can work together remotely and be successful. |
| Improving Consistency of Use Case Points Estimates by Dr. David J. Coe This article presents experimental data on the use of the Use Case Points method to estimate development effort for a semester-scale software product. |
| Good Practices for Developing User Requirements by Ellen Gottesdiener This article provides a requirements model road map that helps software development teams understand the effective use of requirements models. |
| Tabular Notations for State Machine-Based Specifications by Markus Herrmannsdörfer, Dr. Sascha Konrad, and Brian Berenbach This article describes five approaches using tabular notations for state machine-based spe cifications and evaluates these approaches for use in software development. |
| Addressing the Challenges of Tactical Information Management in Net-Centric Systems With DDS by Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt, Dr. Angelo Corsaro, and Hans Van’t Hag This article presents an architectural overview of the Object Management Group Data Distribution Service. |
A few additional interesting posts from the last few issues:
| Development Practices for Small Software Applications by Capers Jones Jones describes the origins, benefits, and differences of process improvement through the use of CMMI and Agile methods, as well as discusses the benefits of hybrid process improvement models. |
| Is CMMI Useful and Usable in Small Settings? One Example by Sandra Cepeda, Suzanne Garcia, and Jacquelyn Langhout This article presents the motivation, the processes used, and the major results of the CMMI for a Small Business pilot from the perspective of the team that worked on the pilot. |
| Why Do I Need All That Process? I’m Only a Small Project by Mark Brodnik, Robyn Plouse, and Terry Leip This article shows how to fix the issue of having a variety of project sizes but a single set of processes originally built for larger projects. |
| The Critical Need for Software Engineering Education by Dr. Lyle N. Long Long describes the need for more dedicated software engineering educational programs and professional software engineering certification programs in the United States. |
| Common Misconceptions About Service-Oriented Architecture by Grace A. Lewis, Edwin Morris, Dr. Dennis B. Smith, Soumya Simanta, and Lutz This article outlines a set of common misconceptions about Service Oriented Architectures and suggests ways to more effectively address critical issues that potential users, developers, and acquisition officers may have. |
| Systems Engineering for the Global Information Grid: An Approach at the Enterprise Level by Patrick M. Kern This article describes an approach at the enterprise level for systems engineering for the Global Information Grid. |
| The Security of Web Services as Software by Karen Mercedes Goertzel This article both describes the content of Special Publication 800-95 and highlights its critical omissions in terms of measures needed to produce Web service software that is in and of itself secure. |
| Four Pillars of Service-Oriented Architecture by Grace A. Lewis and Dr. Dennis B. Smith This article outlines four pillars to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) success and proposes how a Department of Defense organization can develop and implement an effective strategy for SOA implementation. |
| SOA Security Reference Model by Nataraj Nagaratnam, Anthony Nadalin, Janet Mostow and Sridhar Muppidi Merely securing the perimeter with firewalls or routers is not sufficient for a flexible business. Security remains one of the biggest challenges given the complexity of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based environment due to loose coupling1 of services and applications and their possible operations across trust boundaries. Security must be designed to cover the entire SOA environment, with services and applications capable of participating in the enterprise security via security services. In addition, security must be factored into the SOA life cycle, reflecting the fact that security is a business requirement and not just a technology attribute. This article discusses a scenario and identifies a set of security requirements, then talks about capabilities that can be used to address those needs. |
