An overview of DoD-STD-1838A (proposed), the common APSE interface set, revision A

A five-year effort under the Ada Joint Program Office has developed a proposed standard for a host system interface as seen by tools running in an Ada Programming Support Environment (APSE). Standardization of this interface as DOD-STD-1838A will have a number of desirable effects for the Department of Defense, including tool portability, tool integration, data transportability, encouragement of a market in portable tools, and better programmer productivity. As the capability of tools to communicate with each other is a central requirement in APSEs, the Common APSE Interface Set (CAIS) has paid particular attention to facilitate such communication in a host-independent fashion. CAIS incorporates a well-integrated set of concepts tuned to the needs of writers and users of integrated tool sets. This paper covers several of these concepts: the entity management system used in place of a traditional filing system, object typing with inheritance, process control including atomic transactions, access control and security, input/output methods, support for distributed resource control, and facilities for inter-system data transport

A Framework for the Specification of Acquisition Models

This report describes a framework for the specification of acquisition models. The exposition is formal in nature. The framework is defined in terms of activities, events, requirements, and instances of a system. In addition, various relations among these items, such as the relation between acquisition activities and acquisition events, are defined. The timing properties associated with the items receives special treatment. The value of a framework is that one can develop specifications of various acquisition models, such as waterfall, spiral, or incremental, as instances of that framework. Formalizing the specification of an acquisition model has benefit in that one can reason about the characteristics of the domain addressed by the model. When this is done for multiple acquisition models, each derived from the same framework, it is possible to compare different acquisition approaches

provided that the source of such material is fully acknowledged. A Process for COTS Software Product Evaluation

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