Agile Software Development: Creating a Cost of Delay Framework for Air Force Software Factories

The Air Force software development environment is experiencing a paradigm shift. The 2019 Defense Innovation Board concluded that speed and cycle time must become the most important software metrics if the US military is to maintain its advantage over adversaries.1 This article proposes utilizing a cost-o­f-d­elay (CoD) framework to prioritize projects toward optimizing readiness. Cost-­of-d­elay is defined as the economic impact resulting from a delaying product delivery or, said another way, opportunity cost. In principle, CoD assesses the negative impacts resulting from changes to the priority of a project

Common-cause analysis in human-software interaction: system design, error control mechanism, and prevention

This study involves an experiment in the human aspects of systems design in the area of software development. Its overall objectives are to develop a cognitive paradigm including a new model of common cause human-domain error and a common cause error function to define internal common cause human-domain errors and also to determine how to control and prevent common cause errors according to human-software information processing, knowledge-based engineering, and intelligent design in human-software interaction;A laboratory study was performed to analyze the common causes of human error in software development and to identify software design factors contributing to the common cause effects in common cause failure redundancy. Three pilot projects with 46 subjects representing three skill levels were used to establish the design for a cognitive experiment. Following this study, a main experiment using ten programming experts was conducted in order to define a new cognitive paradigm, in the aspects of identification, pattern recognition, and behavior domain for internal human domain common-cause errors, using FORTRAN and C. Software development for optimizing the sequence of machine replacement and for optimal inventory management were used as application problem examples;The results and analytical procedures developed in this research can be applied to reliability improvement and cost reduction in software development for many applications. Results are also expected to provide guidelines for user-friendly software development and for more effective design of common software packages

The CloudSME Simulation Platform and its Applications: A Generic Multi-cloud Platform for Developing and Executing Commercial Cloud-based Simulations

Simulation is used in industry to study a large variety of problems ranging from increasing the productivity of a manufacturing system to optimizing the design of a wind turbine. However, some simulation models can be computationally demanding and some simulation projects require time consuming experimentation. High performance computing infrastructures such as clusters can be used to speed up the execution of large models or multiple experiments but at a cost that is often too much for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Cloud computing presents an attractive, lower cost alternative. However, developing a cloud-based simulation application can again be costly for an SME due to training and development needs, especially if software vendors need to use resources of different heterogeneous clouds to avoid being locked-in to one particular cloud provider. In an attempt to reduce the cost of development of commercial cloud-based simulations, the CloudSME Simulation Platform (CSSP) has been developed as a generic approach that combines an AppCenter with the workflow of the WS-PGRADE/gUSE science gateway framework and the multi-cloud-based capabilities of the CloudBroker Platform. The paper presents the CSSP and two representative case studies from distinctly different areas that illustrate how commercial multi-cloud-based simulations can be created

Software Challenges For HL-LHC Data Analysis

The high energy physics community is discussing where investment is needed to prepare software for the HL-LHC and its unprecedented challenges. The ROOT project is one of the central software players in high energy physics since decades. From its experience and expectations, the ROOT team has distilled a comprehensive set of areas that should see research and development in the context of data analysis software, for making best use of HL-LHC's physics potential. This work shows what these areas could be, why the ROOT team believes investing in them is needed, which gains are expected, and where related work is ongoing. It can serve as an indication for future research proposals and cooperations