14058785
ImpACT: An Alternative to Technology Readiness Levels for Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Software
The use of Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) as a tool in assessing acquisition and development program risk has steadily increased over the past several years. There is considerable evidence to support the utility of using TRLs as part of a risk assessment, but there are some difficulties in using TRLs with software, especially Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software technology and products. These difficulties take several forms, including “blurring-together” various aspects of COTS technology/product readiness; the absence of some important aspects of readiness; COTS product “decay;” and no mechanism to account for changes in the relative importance of the contributors to technology/product readiness over time. This paper briefly examines these issues, and proposes an alternate methodology—ImpACT—for assessing COTS software technology and product readiness which considers these factors.
33417779
Implementing Large-Scale COTS Reengineering within the United States Department of Defense
This paper reports on empirical research into the organizational and process changes necessary to implement large-scale reengineering using COTS. The research goal is to identify how these changes can be effected within the context of the existing United States Department of Defense acquisition management, requirements management, and planning, programming, and budgeting systems. While this effort is still in its early stages, initial results indicate that there are significant challenges in developing and defending budget inputs to support an evolutionary COTS-oriented acquisition model. At the same time, recent changes in acquisition constraints and other mitigating circumstances are being exploited to improve the likelihood of success.
42385078
Using Earned Value Management for COTS-Based Systems: Issues and Recommendations
Earned value management (EVM) has long been used by organizations to plan, monitor, and control the development and evolution of custom developed systems. EVM was developed for managing such projects, and assumes a waterfall development model. COTS-based systems (CBS), on the other hand, are formed and evolved through the selection and composition of pre-existing, off-the-shelf packages or components with potentially some number of custom components. Experience indicates that a spiral or iterative development process is a key to success with CBS. While EVM has been applied to CBS projects, the results have not been uniformly satisfying. This paper explores the fundamental challenges in using EVM with CBS, and proposes adaptations to some of the principals of EVM to render it more suitable for CBS development.
577324
Exploring image functionalities in WWW applications development of image/video search and editing engines
Image technologies provide critical components for achieving various Web-based multimedia applications. We identify key technical challenges in today's image/video applications on the WWW. We present two prototype systems, a video search engine (WebSEEk) and a compressed video editor (WebClip), to demonstrate technical challenges and viable solutions. We also discuss major issues in developing next-generation, scalable solutions for large-scale, distributed on-line environments.
1218721
Toward introducing notification technology into distributed project teams
Software development can be thought of as the evolution of abstract requirements into a concrete software system. The evolution, achieved through a successive series of elaborations and refinements, is inherently a complex process. The complexity is not merely in the product - the complexity of managing the evolution of the product throughout the life of a project is proportional to the size and complexity of the product. Managing software project teams is a complex task complicated by the distribution of project teams. Distributed collaboration requires adequate support for team coordination and risk management. Human-computer interaction (HCI) combines technical concerns with human psychological concerns. Similarly, software project managers confront complexities in both of these dimensions. In this paper, we report on a collaborative design environment called LINK-UP being developed to guide the design process and facilitate reuse, We examine some Web-based project management tools in terms of their support for collaborative design and virtual team processes. We present a notification system approach to making the design record a natural by-product of the design process and a lever for knowledge reuse. Knowledge from past projects could then be used to automatically notify project teams of potential problems and suggest possible solutions.
29643487
Stochastic network evacuation models
Abstract Stochastic network evacuation models are crucial for the safe evacuation of occupants from buildings. In this paper, we compare an analytical closed queueing network and a simulation model for analyzing the evacuation of occupants from a hospital. Evacuation times, arc congestion, and optimization of the evacuation routes and staff assigned to the evacuation network are included.
3042095
Measuring the Robustness of Resource Allocations in a Stochastic Dynamic Environment
Heterogeneous distributed computing systems often must operate in an environment where system parameters are subject to uncertainty. Robustness can be defined as the degree to which a system can function correctly in the presence of parameter values different from those assumed. We present a methodology for quantifying the robustness of resource allocations in a dynamic environment where task execution times are stochastic. The methodology is evaluated through measuring the robustness of three different resource allocation heuristics within the context of a stochastic dynamic environment. A Bayesian regression model is fit to the combined results of the three heuristics to demonstrate the correlation between the stochastic robustness metric and the presented performance metric. The correlation results demonstrated the significant potential of the stochastic robustness metric to predict the relative performance of the three heuristics given a common objective function.
33249562
The Transfusion Medicine Tutor: Using Expert Systems Technology to Teach Domain-Specific Problem-Solving Skills
This study provides data regarding the effectiveness of the expert system-based Transfusion Medicine Tutor (TMT) when used by medical technology students to learn an important problem-solving task, the identification of alloantibodies in a patient's blood for the purpose of finding compatible blood for transfusion. The results show that the students who were taught by an instructor using TMT to provide the instructional environment went from 0% correct on a pre-test case to 87%–93% correct on post-tests (N=15). This compares with an improvement rate of 20% by a control group (N=15) who used a passive version of the system with the tutoring functions turned off. The results also demonstrate the importance of relying on objective performance data rather than questionnaire data to evaluate systems, as there was no difference in the subjective responses of the students to these two different versions of the system.