Last Update
22 October 2003
11 September 2001
Reports, Studies, and Guidelines
This report is a case study of the Control Channel Toolkit (CCT), a software asset base for a software product line of ground-based spacecraft command and control systems built under the direction of the United States National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Beginning with a characterization of the CCT context and a narration of the history of the effort, the report describes the management and software engineering practices, the software artifacts that were developed, the results that were achieved, and the lessons that were learned. It concludes with an accounting of the measurable benefits the government has already reaped in the initial use of CCT on a specific spacecraft command and control system. With the permission of Addison-Wesley, this report is extracted from Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns [Clements 01], where it was published with the approval of the National Reconnaissance Office.
Contents
This report represents a milestone of a work in progress. That work is a comprehensive handbook on how to produce high-quality documentation for software architectures. The handbook, tentatively entitled Documenting Software Architectures,1 will be published in early 2002 by Addison Wesley Longman as part of the SEI Series on Software Engineering. Since this report is a snapshot of current work, the material described here may change before the handbook is published.
The theme of the report is that documenting an architecture entails documenting the set of relevant views of that architecture, and then completing the picture by documenting information that transcends any single view. The audience for Documenting Software Architectures is the community of practicing architects, apprentice architects, and developers who receive architectural documentation.
Table of Contents:
6 Epilogue
This report provides the results of a benchmarking study to identify the best training practices within the software engineering community. We surveyed 24 organizations to create a broad picture of training as it currently exists in industry. We then chose three of these organizations for an in-depth study to identify the best training practices and enablers to those practices. This report summarizes the results of the survey and the in-depth study, and discusses the best practices and enablers that were identified.
A product line is a set of related systems that address a market segment. Building a product line out of a common set of core assets, as opposed to building each member system separately, epitomizes reuse. Although software technology is key to achieving a product line capability, organizational and process considerations are just as crucial. This report describes the experience of one company, CelsiusTech Systems AB of Sweden, that builds large, complex, embedded, real-time shipboard command-and-control systems as a product line, developed in common from a base set of core software and organizational assets. The report describes the changes that CelsiusTech had to make to its software, organizational, and process structures to redirect the company toward a product line approach that yielded substantial economic and marketplace benefits to the company.
