Blog Posts
Challenges in Making the Transition to Digital Engineering
Challenges observed in making the transition from traditional development practices to digital engineering (DE).
• By Bill Nichols
The Current State of DevSecOps Metrics
DevSecOps practices yield useful, valuable information about software performance that is likely to lead to innovations in software engineering metrics.
• By Bill Nichols
In DevSecOps
Stop Wasting Time: Manage Time as the Limiting Resource
Lost time is never found. - Ben Franklin. Driven by a competitive marketplace, software developers and programmers are often pressured to adhere to unrealistically aggressive schedules....
• By Bill Nichols
Programmer Moneyball: Challenging the Myth of Individual Programmer Productivity
A pervasive belief in the field of software engineering is that some programmers are much, much better than others (the times-10, or x10, programmer), and that the skills...
• By Bill Nichols
In Enterprise Risk and Resilience Management
Why Software Architects Must Be Involved in the Earliest Systems Engineering Activities
Today's major defense systems rely heavily on software-enabled capabilities. However, many defense programs acquiring new systems first determine the physical items to develop....
• By Sarah Sheard, Suzanne Miller, Bill Nichols, Donald Firesmith, Mike Phillips
In Software Architecture
Model-Based Analysis of Agile Development Practices
Applications of Agile development practices in government are providing experience that decision makers can use to improve policy, procedure, and practice....
• By Andrew Moore, Bill Nichols, Bill Novak, David Zubrow
In Agile
Cost-Effective Software Security Assurance Workflows
Software developers are increasingly pressured to rapidly deliver cutting-edge software at an affordable cost....
• By Bill Nichols
How to Identify Key Causal Factors That Influence Software Costs: A Case Study
DoD programs continue to experience cost overruns; the inadequacies of cost estimation were cited by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) as one of the top problem areas....
• By Bill Nichols
Heartbleed and Goto Fail: Two Case Studies for Predicting Software Assurance Using Quality and Reliability Measures
Mitre's Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors is a list that details quality problems, as well as security problems. This list aims to help software developers "prevent the kinds of …
• By Carol Woody, Bill Nichols
Incorporating Verified Design by Contract into PSP
This blog post presents an approach for incorporating formal methods with PSP, in particular, Verified Design by Contract, to reduce the number of defects earlier in the software development lifecycle …