Edwin J. Morris

A Process for COTS Software Product Evaluation

The growing use of commercial products in large systems makes evaluation and selection of appropriate products an increasingly essential activity. However, many organizations struggle in their attempts to select an appropriate product for use in systems. As part of a cooperative effort, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and the National Research Council Canada (NRC) have defined a tailorable software product evaluation process that can support organizations in making carefully reasoned and sound product decisions. This paper describes that process.

Service-Oriented Migration and Reuse Technique (SMART)

This report describes the service-oriented migration and reuse technique (SMART). SMART is a technique that helps organizations analyze legacy systems to determine whether their functionality, or subsets of it, can be reasonably exposed as services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA), and thus to achieve greater interoperability. Converting legacy components to services allows systems to remain largely unchanged while exposing functionality to a large number of clients through well-defined service interfaces. A number of organizations are adopting this approach by defining SOAs that include a set of infrastructure common services on which organizations can build additional domain services or applications. SMART considers the specific interactions that will be required by the target SOA and any changes that must be made to the legacy components. An early version of SMART was applied with good success to assist a DoD organization in evaluating the potential for converting components of an existing system into services that would run in a new and tightly constrained SOA environment

The Role of Cloudlets in Hostile Environments

The convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing is predicated on a reliable, high-bandwidth end-to-end network. This basic requirement is hard to guarantee in hostile environments such as military operations and disaster recovery. In this article, the authors examine how VM-based cloudlets that are located in close proximity to associated mobile devices can overcome this challenge. This article is part of a special issue on the edge of the cloud.

Analyzing the reuse potential of migrating legacy components to a service-oriented architecture

An effective way of leveraging the value of legacy systems is to expose their functionality, or subsets of it, as services. In the business world, this has become a very popular approach because it allows underlying systems to remain largely unchanged, while exposing functionality to a larger number of clients through well-defined service interfaces. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is also adopting this approach by defining service-oriented architectures (SOAs) that include a set of infrastructure common services on which organizations can build additional domain services or applications. When legacy systems or components are to be used as the foundation for domain services, there must be an analysis of how to convert the functionality in existing systems into services. This analysis should consider the specific interactions that is required by the SOA and any changes that need to be made to the legacy components. We have recently helped an organization evaluate the potential for converting components of an existing system into services that would run in a new and tightly constrained DoD SOA environment. This paper describes the process that was used and outlines several issues that need to be addressed in making similar migrations

A Reference Architecture for Mobile Code Offload in Hostile Environments

Handheld mobile technology can help disaster relief workers and soldiers in the field with tasks such as speech and image recognition, natural language processing, decision-making, and mission planning. However, these applications are computation-intensive, take a heavy toll on battery power, and often rely on good connectivity to networks, limiting their practical usefulness in a crisis. This paper presents a reference architecture for mobile devices that overcomes these limitations by exploiting cloudlets - VM-based code offload elements that are in single-hop proximity to mobile devices.

SMART: Analyzing the Reuse Potential of Legacy Components in a Service-Oriented Architecture Environment

Abstract : Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an increasingly popular mechanism for achieving interoperability between systems. Because it has characteristics of loose coupling, published interfaces, and a standard communication model, SOA enables existing legacy systems to expose their functionality as services, presumably without making significant changes to the legacy systems. Migration of legacy systems to service-oriented environments has been achieved within a number of domains including banking, electronic payment, and development tools showing that the promise is beginning to be fulfilled. While migration can have significant value, any specific migration requires a concrete analysis of the feasibility, risk, and cost involved. This technical note describes a new release of the Service Migration and Reuse Technique (SMART), which was initially developed in 2005. The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) SMART process helps organizations to make initial decisions about the feasibility of reusing legacy components as services within an SOA environment. SMART considers the specific interactions that will be required by the target SOA environment and any changes that must be made to the legacy components. To achieve this, SMART gathers information about legacy components, the target SOA environment, and candidate services to produce (1) a preliminary analysis of the viability of migrating legacy components to services, (2) an analysis of the migration strategies available, and (3) preliminary estimates of the costs and risks involved in the migration.

Requirements engineering for systems of systems

Traditional requirements engineering for single systems, while remaining a large challenge for engineers, has been extensively researched and many techniques have been proposed and used with varying degree of success. However, many modern systems of systems are being developed to support interaction across multiple controlling authorities and existing techniques are proving to be inadequate for meeting the challenges of requirements engineering for systems of systems. This paper discusses some of these challenges, examines several existing techniques, and discusses how these techniques could be applied to engineer requirements for systems of systems.

An investigation into the state-of-the-practice of CASE tool integration

In the second half of 1992 a team of the SEI CASE Environments project conducted a study into the state-of-the-practice with respect to the operational use of integrated computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools. After many false starts, we interviewed a number of examples of large organizations with integrated CASE tools in operational use on software development projects. Compared to the state-of-the-art described in much of the literature, what was found might be considered modest. Compared to industry norms, it was quite impressive, representing significant commitment, ingenuity, and significant attention to end user needs. This report details our observations, and analyzes the current state-of-the-practice of CASE tool integration as revealed by our study. It also speculates on reasons for the modest state-of-the-practice.<<ETX>>

Challenges for assuring quality of service in a service-oriented environment

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an increasingly popular mechanism for achieving business agility and reuse. However, organizations implementing SOA-based solutions are facing new implementation challenges related to validation and verification activities in an SOA environment, especially of runtime system quality attributes such as interoperability, security, reliability, and performance. This position paper presents some of these challenges.

Engineering lessons for systems of systems learned from service-oriented systems

In todays rapidly changing environment it is no longer possible for isolated systems to provide all the capabilities that are necessary to fulfill a mission. Therefore, there is an increasing trend towards interconnected systems of systems that provide capabilities not available in a single system. However, existing software and system engineering practices do not scale well to SoS—engineering a system of systems (SoS) is still an open problem with significant challenges. Understanding these challenges and providing engineering solutions will require a two-pronged approach. First, a top-down approach that models an SoS at an abstract level is essential to understand key concerns that exist independent of the technologies used to implement the SoS. SoS research challenges about these concerns are well understood now. Second, a bottom-up approach that focuses on abstracting the concepts and lessons learned from specific examples of engineering systems of systems is needed. Currently, the most common approaches for engineering software-intensive systems of systems are service-oriented architecture (SOA), Grid Computing, and Cloud Computing—all of which are distributed computing paradigms. In the future, newer technologies may replace or complement these existing engineering approaches. This paper focuses on the bottom-up approach by exploring several areas where lessons learned from SOA implementations can be abstracted and applied to systems of systems, regardless of the implementation technology.