We read this article recently:

Curtis has been tremendously influential in the software process improvement field, and this Curtis paper was his most highly cited: Google Scholar lists 763 papers which cite it. Of those papers which cite this one, more than fifty of them have been cited more than 50 times, themselves. Of his other papers, 11 that I can find have been cited more than 50 times and six more than 150 times (again according to Google Scholar). Those papers were all written between 1979 and 1995, in the golden years of software methodology resarch.

Other parts of Curtis' work is familiar to us, even if we didn't know he was involved. He is a former director of the Software Process Program at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, the creators of CMM and CMMI. He co-authored the Capability Maturity Model for Software, and was the chief architect of the People Capability Maturity Model (PCMM). PCMM reminds me a lot of a practitioner's approach to achieving a learning organziation.

PCMM reflects what he learned in this paper (as far as I can tell from the summaries I've found):

• The People CMM systematically infuses the required competencies, leading to empowerment. At level 3, the manager begins to trust the process and steps a little back. At level 4, the manager takes advantage of the frame-work installed till level 3, and steps further back. At level 5, interactions of workgroups with those in other units are aligned. Performance is aligned to optimize the system. The model helps systematically manage performance. “The issue is not evaluating individuals. But to bring in continuing discussion of how work is performed.” [1]

Currently, he a founding partner of Capability Measurement (couldn't find anything out about this company) and was until recently the chief process officer of Borland Software Corporation (he remains their chief process advisor). He was the co-founder and chief scientist of TeraQuest Metrics, Inc (acquired in 2005 by Borland), which helped large companies manage and take control of their software development processes [2] .

This is an e-mail I got (I can't remember how I ever got to their e-mail distribution) just recently and I think the subject has a lot of relevance to our class, most notably with respect to our text.  Unfortunately, the presentation will take place after our class is over.  The presentation may prove valuable to those who will take this class in the future to supplement the text.

 

SOA promises increased flexibility, but how can you ensure its effectiveness? The key lies in SOA Governance. It's what binds all the inherent application fragments together. And it's what drives the desired business results, based on your identified goals. The end result is not only a clearer vision, but the empowerment to make that vision a reality.

For a detailed discussion of what SOA Governance is, why it's important and what related challenges typically arise from it, register for the complimentary online presentation "Making SOA Governance Real: Policy Management and Integrated Registries."

http://www.accelacomm.com/jlp/idgc1/46/80089332/

This presentation, courtesy of IBM and IDG Connect, will take place at 11AM Eastern (8AM Pacific) Thursday, August 2, 2007. If you have a schedule conflict and can't attend, don't worry. Register now anyway, and if you miss the live version, you can watch it later on-demand.

We think you'll find it very interesting.

Best regards,

IDG Connect

P.S. If you attend this live Web Seminar, as a bonus, you will receive complimentary access to a recent IBM whitepaper on Metadata Management as well as a WSRR Demo and a RAM Demo.

As the group might have guessed, I really enjoyed Paul Witman's talk.  I'm a giant security freak, and I practically started salivating when he started to draw the flow diagram for the ATM transaction... ah, the ways you can game the system!  There are so many links in the chain!  Muh-hahahaha!

No, I'm not really an evil genius or a criminal mastermind.  Really. 

The thing I enjoyed most about the presentation was the fact that he talked about the process of executing a financial transaction without relying solely upon the business rules or the technical rules enforced by the independent objects involved; instead talking about the fact that both sets of rules were encapsulated by the system and indeed the system itself has to be designed to allow different sets of business rules work at different stages of the transaction.  

Here's the "make the ATM dispense more money than it should" story, although I got some of the details muddled with this other story.  The machine in question thought it was dispensing $5 (instead of $10s), and it did indeed occur in the US, not in the UK/Canada.

Edited 07/16/2007 ->  Somebody got away/is getting away with it again.  You'd think this particular loophole would have been closed... 

I was a little fuzzy on trying to figure out how the caching examples drawn on the board during Bill Bryant's presentation actually work.  A lot of the articles out there spend too much emphasis on the theory and not enough time explaining in simple terms what the heck is going on.

Wikipedia has two entries on this which seem to help explain this.  The first is their article on Bit Torrents which does a pretty good explanation on what happens in a P2P environment (complete with an animated graphic showing the relationships between nodes).

The other article is on Hashing Algorithms and spends some time explaining what those are and how they can be used.  Simply put, you take values (a title for example) through that into a formula and it spits out a value what can represent the title.  The problem is what to do with Hash Collisions, something that is explained in another article.

Watch, by mentioning this, this question won't be on the final.  Then again, I am wrong from time to time (more often than not when trying to pick what questions will be on a test). 

From IEEE-explore (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4026873/4026874/04026930.pdf?tp=&a)

Evaluation of Strategies for Integrating Legacy Applications as Services in a Service Oriented Architecture, by Abdelkarim Erradi, Sriram Anand, & Naveen Kulkarni

The authors introduce "Solution Options Analysis Process", a framework for evaulating different approaches to modernization to determine cost-effectiveness... in other words, to help determine if a modernization/transformation/integration project is worthwhile.  It's a little lacking in depth, but since Erl (in this book anyway) is focusing more on the process of "how" (albeit with plenty of warnings of drawbacks, etc.) he hasn't dedicated much verbage yet to quantifying "why", it caught my eye.

 

SOAWorld Magazine

Article by Thomas Erl

I found an article by Thomas Erl on “Best Practices for Transition Planning.”  The article was quite interesting and fit nicely with Chapter 9...especially the section where Erl outlines the feasibility analysis of service-enabling traditional integration architectures (figure 9-27 on page 346).  The best practices discussed in the article focused on the groundwork of developing a transition plan.

Erl states that the “best defense against the potential disruptions, costs, and risks that can follow SOA into an organization is the creation of an SOA Transition Plan.”  The article provides a list of the following 8 best practices to consider when preparing for and developing a Transition Plan:

1.      Define SOA Within Your Own Organization: need to have a clear vision of SOA because this is the core of the plan.

2.      Invest in an Impact Analysis Before Developing the Transition Plan: to assess the feasibility of a transition to SOA, the organizations needs to estimate the real-world impact (initial impact analysis) such a migration will have.

3.      Set the Scope of the Transition: using the impact analysis results as a guide, and other factors such as budget, requirements and external drivers, determine the scope of the planned transition.

4.      Change the Project Team’s Mindset: applying service-oriented principles can result in complex automation solutions.  The project team will need to change the way it thinks about fundamental aspects of common architecture.

5.      Expect Evolution to be Part of the Migration: products that implement WS-* standards will undergo continuous refinements.

6.      Use Speculative Analysis to Build Toward a Future State: build an environment capable of providing more than what the immediate requirements ask for based on corporate goals and anticipated changes.

7.      Prepare for Post-Migration Growth: take the post-migration growth into account ahead of time – what will it take to maintain and expand the environment?

8.      Plan Transition Phases Around the Introduction of Custom Standards: create and enforce custom standards.  Phasing in SOA custom standards requires the support and cooperation of the entire IT department.

You can view the entire article at: http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/46873.htm.

 

Reference: Erl, Thomas; “Best Practices for Transition Planning”, 2007 Sys-Con Media Inc.

Summary of: 

Graves, S; Ramachandran, R; Keiser, K; Maskey, M; Lynnes, C; "Deployable Suite of Data Mining Web Services for Online Science Data Repositories", 23rd Conference on IIPS, (2007).
 

Background 

I read this article because I wanted to find a example of someone who wanted to use web services for something that was (a) specific and real (b) compelling (to me), and (c) includes integration of legacy systems and data stores. Most of my reading about web services has been generic, hypothetical, or simply uninteresting (for example, "retrieve purchase orders", or "process inventory". Yawn.).  

Summary

NASA is focused on developing a distributed service-oriented architecture to enable remote data processing of its huge data stores. This paper describes a NASA ACCESS project called “Deployable Suite of Data Mining Web Services for Online Science Data Repositories”, which is aimed at developing web service based technology to allow scientists to locally define analysis workflows that can directly use data residing in online repositories. Furthermore, it aims to allow scientists both within and outside of NASA to "combine persistent distributed data processing services and make them available to other users over the internet" (p. 1).

This project has chosen web service technology because it "provides a standard way to remotely interface with programmatic components and to orchestrate the chaining of services through standardized service descriptions" (p. 2). The web services solution being developed by this project uses the standard XML/SOAP/WSDL group, plus BPEL4WS for process orchestration. The project will be using an existing XML schema for data transfer (ESML, the Earth Science Markup Language) and will adapt an existing data mining toolkit (the ADaM (Algorithm Development and Mining) Toolkit) to allow existing data mining algorithms to be adapted and new ones to be developed, and will encapsulate existing data access and analysis applications (such as the Simple, Scalable Script-based Science Processor for Measurements (S4PM)).

Much of the goal of this project is to expose to scientists worldwide the both legacy data sets and databases, to future data sets and databases, and to share data mining and analysis solutions. These previously were inaccessible outside of NASA computers, and required researchers to request access, and either go to the NASA site, or to transport huge quantities of data from NASA to their own site for processing. Any analysis solution developed by that researcher would typically remain isolated at that researcher's site and would not be accessible to other scientists.

The article also describes a prototype architecture, and relates a description of its first application.

Issues

WSDL records

This paper contains the first description I've found of in-situ use of WSDL, as well as workflows:

• "A workflow is generated within the Workflow Composer [part of ActiveBPEL], based on experimentation in the Sand Box. This workflow is then deployed to a BPEL engine, which returns a URL pointing to the WSDL for that workflow. This URL is then transmitted to the GES DISC via a Web Services request along with a specification of the data to be mined, such as the dataset to be mined and temporal or spatial constraints" (p. 6).

NASA ACCESS

NASA ACCESS seems to be a NASA sponsored project to create computational infrastructure which will allow scientists to more easily share data and processing resources. Other NASA ACCESS projects I found on the Internet are: the Data and Information Application Layer (DIAL) project, A Distributed Knowledge Extraction Framework Based on SemanticWeb Services (SKIF) and Modeling and On-the-fly Solutions for Solid Earth Sciences (MOSES).

I came across this recorded presentation about the integration of web services into legacy systems (or is it the other way around?).  The presentation may sound a bit advertorial since one of the panelist is from CA and is promoting one of their solution package.  On a side note, I briefly worked for CA when it acquired Platinum Technology in 1999.

Unfortunately, there's no transcript or PDF version of the presentation.  Thus, you need to walk through the 60-minute long presentation on a WebEx player.  It may be worth your while to watch it since the panelists covered some of the points presented on Chapter 9.

The title of their topic is "Legacy Modernization: The Time is Now".  Here are some of the key points of the presentation:

• Modernize your legacy systems to new technologies without rewriting your code
• Extend the serviceable life of your mainframe with technologies such as J2EE, .NET, and Web services
• Automate the modernization process to significantly reduce the time, cost and risk associated with these projects
• Create a more agile development environment -allowing the old and new to peacefully co-exist and providing workable options when confronted with legislative, rule and process change

On a Mac, clicking the "Playback" button launched a Java-based WebEx player.  Windows users need to install Java (if one is not yet installed) to see the presentation.

Function points are a standard unit of measure that represent the functional size of a software application.

I found a website which will allow you to calculate function point (It's a Java application). Please, have a look at this link and if some one can check how much sense it makes: http://ivs.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/sw-eng/us/java/fp/ 

 

Mission Energy (division of Edison)
<http://www.edison.com/ourcompany/eme.asp>

Capital Company (division of Edison)
<http://www.edison.com/ourcompany/ec.asp>


California Deregulation explained (Cato Institute, a personal favorite, similar to the Claremont Institute)
<http://www.cato.org/research/articles/taylor-010119.html>
<http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba348/>

Function Points explained (needs verification)
<http://www.stickyminds.com/sitewide.asp?Function=edetail&Objec>

High Voltage Transmission wires - skinning effect (no, I can't do the math but the theory is easy to understand)  Lower voltages behave differently, they use the whole conductor until you voltage is high enough to push the current flow to the edge of the conductor (the key here is the voltage and its operating frequency, as both go higher, the current moves to the edge).
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect>
Hoover Dam transmission lines (you can get parts of this from the gift shop, good tour, look for the pen in the upper left, you pay for the pen since there is a government mandate that you can't pay for something twice (you paid for the cable with your taxes already, so you are buying a $5.00 pen))
<https://www.vegas.com/attractions/outside_lasvegas/hooverdams>
Hoover Dam provides power to the following agencies
<http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/faqs/powerfaq.html>
The tour has changed radically since I was a kid, you used to be able to walk through the power plant and down on the generator floor.  Since 9/11, they built a better tour center and limit access to the power plant part and do much more through video and look-outs.  Still a good tour, but you won't get the hard hat tour like they had 10 years ago (bummer).
NA Power transmission grid
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission>



SCE Customer Service
<http://www.sce.com/CustomerService/>
Various Customer Service functions do not exist.  Live Chat does not exist yet.  Telecommuting does not exist yet (over IP infrastructe in a model similar to Jet Blue)

UCI software tools
<http://www.isr.uci.edu/architecture/>



Notes for Peter Suk's Talk

DOD 2167, only 95 pages long
<http://www.product-lifecycle-management.com/download/DOD-STD-2167A.pdf>

Book
<http://www.amazon.com/Balancing-Agility-Discipline-Guide-Perp>

UCI Software tools
<http://www.isr.uci.edu/architecture/>