RESUMEN

Software engineering projects are complex sociotechnical systems whose behavior is the result of many technical and human factors, from personnel skills to development tools and processes to business goals. Project managers must identify the right combination of these factors to obtain the desired results. In many fields, managers get support from sophisticated decision support systems, but these haven't yet entered the software engineering mainstream. A hybrid modeling approach can quickly produce process models that can provide project managers accurate predictions, help them design the desired project trajectory, and validate process changes. The NASA Software Engineering Laboratory process provides a case study.

RESUMEN

In contemporary societies, individuals and organizations increasingly depend on services delivered by sophisticated software-intensive systems. Dependability has become a key systems property, which needs to be engineered and guaranteed regardless of continuous, rapid, and unpredictable technological and context changes. But, what is dependability? Dependability relates strictly to the specific goals the system's users want to achieve. So, in different circumstances, dependability implies different system attributes (for example, availability, real-time response, and ability to avoid catastrophic failures and resist adverse conditions), as well as different levels of adherence to such attributes. Achieving and maintaining dependability can't happen without firmly understanding its meaning. In this perspective, the authors introduce the Unified Model of Dependability, a modeling language that lets you reason about dependability and turn it into clearly defined and implementable system properties. Experience in the NASA High Dependability Computing Program provides a case study for UMD.