Software engineering

Today's software systems generally use obsolete technology, are not integrated properly with other software systems, and are difficult and costly to maintain. The discipline of reverse engineering is becoming prominent as organizations try to move their systems up to more modern and maintainable technology in a cost effective manner. The Johnson Space Center (JSC) created a significant set of tools to develop and maintain FORTRAN and C code during development of the space shuttle. This tool set forms the basis for an integrated environment to reengineer existing code into modern software engineering structures which are then easier and less costly to maintain and which allow a fairly straightforward translation into other target languages. The environment will support these structures and practices even in areas where the language definition and compilers do not enforce good software engineering. The knowledge and data captured using the reverse engineering tools is passed to standard forward engineering tools to redesign or perform major upgrades to software systems in a much more cost effective manner than using older technologies. The latest release of the environment was in Feb. 1992

Software reengineering

Today's software systems generally use obsolete technology, are not integrated properly with other software systems, and are difficult and costly to maintain. The discipline of reverse engineering is becoming prominent as organizations try to move their systems up to more modern and maintainable technology in a cost effective manner. JSC created a significant set of tools to develop and maintain FORTRAN and C code during development of the Space Shuttle. This tool set forms the basis for an integrated environment to re-engineer existing code into modern software engineering structures which are then easier and less costly to maintain and which allow a fairly straightforward translation into other target languages. The environment will support these structures and practices even in areas where the language definition and compilers do not enforce good software engineering. The knowledge and data captured using the reverse engineering tools is passed to standard forward engineering tools to redesign or perform major upgrades to software systems in a much more cost effective manner than using older technologies. A beta vision of the environment was released in Mar. 1991. The commercial potential for such re-engineering tools is very great. CASE TRENDS magazine reported it to be the primary concern of over four hundred of the top MIS executives

The development and technology transfer of software engineering technology at NASA. Johnson Space Center

The United State's big space projects of the next decades, such as Space Station and the Human Exploration Initiative, will need the development of many millions of lines of mission critical software. NASA-Johnson (JSC) is identifying and developing some of the Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) technology that NASA will need to build these future software systems. The goal is to improve the quality and the productivity of large software development projects. New trends are outlined in CASE technology and how the Software Technology Branch (STB) at JSC is endeavoring to provide some of these CASE solutions for NASA is described. Key software technology components include knowledge-based systems, software reusability, user interface technology, reengineering environments, management systems for the software development process, software cost models, repository technology, and open, integrated CASE environment frameworks. The paper presents the status and long-term expectations for CASE products. The STB's Reengineering Application Project (REAP), Advanced Software Development Workstation (ASDW) project, and software development cost model (COSTMODL) project are then discussed. Some of the general difficulties of technology transfer are introduced, and a process developed by STB for CASE technology insertion is described

Analysis of Software Binaries for Reengineering-Driven Product Line Architecture\^aAn Industrial Case Study

This paper describes a method for the recovering of software architectures from a set of similar (but unrelated) software products in binary form. One intention is to drive refactoring into software product lines and combine architecture recovery with run time binary analysis and existing clustering methods. Using our runtime binary analysis, we create graphs that capture the dependencies between different software parts. These are clustered into smaller component graphs, that group software parts with high interactions into larger entities. The component graphs serve as a basis for further software product line work. In this paper, we concentrate on the analysis part of the method and the graph clustering. We apply the graph clustering method to a real application in the context of automation / robot configuration software tools.Comment: In Proceedings FMSPLE 2015, arXiv:1504.0301

Simulation for business processes and information systems design

Business Process (BP) literature promotes the value of business processes as essential gearwheels that help organizations to reach their goals. Similarly, many process design approaches claim that Information Technology (IT) is a major enabler of business process, a view also shared by the Information Systems (IS) community. Despite this, BP and IS approaches do not provide clear guidance on how to assess the benefits that a given IS design may bring to the BP prior the IS implementation. Nor is clear indication of which modeling techniques could be used to assess such relationship. This paper uses the insights gained during a UK funded research project, namely ASSESS-IT, that aimed to depict the dynamic relationships between BP and IT to propose an alternative framework to develop BP simulation models that depict the dynamic behavior of the relationships between BP and IS

Issues with implementing ERP in the public administration

As governments work to transform their environments from an internal resource optimization to a process integration and external collaboration focus, integrated systems stand at the forefront of solutions that will achieve this goal. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is proven to significantly increase efficiency, improve information access, reduce total cost of ownership, and help government achieve the highest levels of accountability and constituent service. Yet implementing ERP in a manner that achieves its promises is no easy task. Public sector organizations often rationalize their ERP modernization initiatives within the context of budgetary constraints and are faced with multiple ERP providers that, on the surface, are difficult to discern. In addition, adjudicating between competing ERP solutions on their functional merit is not only difficult because of the complexity of ERP systems, but it is further complicated by the intricacy of the government acquisition process. Therefore, it is particularly important that the business value be sold at the executive and political levels of government and, to be successful, that government embeds the ERP solution within its culture and processes. What's more, the level of detailed analysis required to map functional requirements to ERP solutions is an arduous task that, even if done thoroughly, hasn't always delivered a successful implementation. In this article, we will address these issues by examining the evolution and shortcomings of ERP solutions; by defining the features and functionality needed to address government transformation; and by recommending the steps to take to position for success.government, public organizations, ERP, integrated systems