Lorenzo Oldain Thompson

Business Areas:

Software Development Process

This software development process can be planned either incrementally or as a waterfall project. The incremental process flowchart defines the stages and flow of the process for a single increment. The waterfall process flowchart defines the stages and flow for a whole project. The stages have been carefully designed so that they can be used in either mode without modification.

The software development process is business process, requirements, use case, risk and model driven. It provides traceability through all stages from business processes through system requirements, analysis and design models into test scripts and code. It conforms to the Software Process Engineering Metamodel and the Model Driven Architecture approach. LOT Software Engineering Consultants are currently utilizing the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), Staged Representation, Level 3 achieved during the development of the F-15 Technical Assistance Database System (TADS). It also incorporates the broad principles of many current development trends including component-based development, agile development, test-driven development and even extreme programming.

LOT Software Engineering Process (SEP) represents a collection of process disciplines, sample artifacts, and tool usage guidelines collected from the Rational Unified Process (RUP), Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), Enterprise Project Management Methodology (EPMM) and the System Development Methodology (SDM). LOT SEP has been proven on software development efforts in collaboration with several of the US Air Force weapons systems.

LOT SEP disciplines are tightly coupled sets of activities, practices, and resulting artifacts which seek to achieve a common goal. LOT SEP consists of six disciplines. These disciplines are enumerated and explained below.

Business Modeling - This discipline is tightly coupled with the Enterprise Project Management Methodology (EPMM), using several of the EPMM outputs for creation of business modeling artifacts. This discipline also marks the first stage in the evolution of the application's use cases and data structures.
Requirements - Requirements is the most important of the SEP's disciplines. It includes the capture of the system's business and supplementary requirements as well as the initiation of traceability activities for these requirements. For applications developing in an iterative fashion, the iteration plan, which spells out the requirements to be tackled during a particular iteration, is also a major artifact or this discipline.
Analysis and Design - As part of the analysis and design discipline, the application's requirements are further refined. A comprehensive design model is created; this design model will serve as the basis for implementation activities.
Implementation - During the implementation discipline, most of the development-related activities take place. This includes the actual development, validation of the development products using a unit testing suite, creation of API documentation, and establishing a deployment unit for migration to environments beyond development.
Testing and Quality Assurance - This disciplines includes planning, creating, and implementing tests of various kinds. These tests could include integration tests, user acceptance tests, load tests, stress tests, or other types of testing which may or may not be automated. Also included in this discipline are provisions for software quality by means of a software quality plan.
Configuration and Change Management - There are two important aspects to the configuration and change management discipline. First, this discipline includes software engineering specific refinements to the change management procedures inherited from the project management process. Second, this discipline specifies how software change management and configuration management interact, allowing for changes to be tied back to specific requests.