Software Engineering Institute

This paper suggests that the software engineering community could exploit simulation to much greater advantage. There are several reasons for this. First, the Office of the Secretary of Defense has indicated that simulation will play a significant role in the acquisition of defense-related systems to cut costs, improve reliability and bring systems into operation more rapidly. Second, there many areas where simulation can be applied to support software development and acquisition.  Such areas include requirements specification, process improvement, architecture trade-off analysis and product line practices.  Third, commercial simulation technology, capable of supporting software development needs is now mature, is easy to use, is of low cost and is readily available.