Fewer Mistakes on the First Day: Architectural Strategies and Their Impacts on Acquisition Outcomes

Tenth Annual Acquisition Research Symposium Acquisition ManagementExcerpt from the Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Acquisition Research Symposium Acquisition ManagementNaval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research ProgramPrepared for the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CANaval Postgraduate School Acquisition Research ProgramApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

DEVELOPING A METADATA REPOSITORY FOR DISTRIBUTED FILE ANNOTATION AND SHARING

Research data is being generated and modified at an increasingly accelerated rate. Iterations and derivations are being crafted at an almost equal velocity. With this increase comes a growing need to track the metadata about the data being generated. Where did this dataset originate? What exactly do the column headers mean? Who was the original publisher? Do I have the latest version of the data? This is to only name a few. As data is shared second or third-hand, or via alternative methods such as physical media or cloud based storage mechanisms, the veracity of the implicit metadata becomes circumstantial. This research quantified and contrasted existing file metadata management solutions, showing their inadequacy to solve the above stated problem, and highlighted the need for a new solution. The system subsequently established and developed by this research was designed to allow for arbitrary file metadata definitions across file systems in a collaborative manner, while facilitating platform independence and easy adoption

Building a Robust Web Application

Change is inevitable. Software applications must be prepared for that inevitable moment by following structured robust software design and architecture. Utilizing popular n-tier architectures and robust philosophies in web applications enables developers to implement robust systems that are prepared for the unknown future. This project highlights and demonstrates robust software development techniques in a prototype web application using an n-tier architecture. The examples are designed to provide a robust philosophy that can be applied to similar robust solutions for other development efforts

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways

Accomplishing adaptability in simulation frameworks: the bubble approach

Enforcing framework adaptability is one of the key points in the process of building an object-oriented application framework. When it comes to simulation, some adaptation mechanisms to configure components on-the-fly are usually required in order to produce good software artifacts and alleviate development effort. The paper reports an experience using a simulation multi-agent framework, initially conceived to be used in fluid flow problems. The framework architecture demonstrated during its evolution a great potential regarding to flexibility and modularity, tackling a wide range of other problems ranging from a network protocol simulation to a soccer simulationI Workshop de Agentes y Sistemas Inteligentes (WASI)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Inherently flexible software

Software evolution is an important and expensive consequence of software. As Lehman's First Law of Program Evolution states, software must be changed to satisfy new user requirements or become progressively less useful to the stakeholders of the software. Software evolution is difficult for a multitude of different reasons, most notably because of an inherent lack of evolveability of software, design decisions and existing requirements which are difficult to change and conflicts between new requirements and existing assumptions and requirements. Software engineering has traditionally focussed on improvements in software development techniques, with little conscious regard for their effects on software evolution. The thesis emphasises design for change, a philosophy that stems from ideas in preventive maintenance and places the ease of software evolution more at the centre of the design of software systems than it is at present. The approach involves exploring issues of evolveability, such as adaptability, flexibility and extensibility with respect to existing software languages, models and architectures. A software model, SEvEn, is proposed which improves on the evolveability of these existing software models by improving on their adaptability, flexibility and extensibility, and provides a way to determine the ripple effects of changes by providing a reflective model of a software system. The main conclusion is that, whilst software evolveability can be improved, complete adaptability, flexibility and extensibility of a software system is not possible, hi addition, ripple effects can't be completely eradicated because assumptions will always persist in a software system and new requirements may conflict with existing requirements. However, the proposed reflective model of software (which consists of a set of software entities, or abstractions, with the characteristic of increased evolveability) provides trace-ability of ripple effects because it explicitly models the dependencies that exist between software entities, determines how software entities can change, ascertains the adaptability of software entities to changes in other software entities on which they depend and determines how changes to software entities affect those software entities that depend on them