Introduction to the special issue on Software Life Cycle Management
In August of 1978, the United States Army Computer Systems Command sponsored the Second Software Life Cycle Management Workshop in Atlanta, Georgia. The Workshop was organized by the U.S. Army Institute for Research in Management Information and Computer Science (AIRMICS). I served as Program Chairman and Major Edward Ely of AIRMICS served as General Chairman. The Workshop brought together forty researchers in the area of Software Life Cycle Management Technology to discuss theory, practice, and technology in managing software over its life cycle. The participants worked to outline, identify, and describe the phenomonology of software development by trying to validate, refine, extend, and exploit models and metrics pertaining to life cycle management. The goal of the workshop was to foster the emergence of a viable life cycle management technology that could eventually allow accurate estimation and control of the time and resources necessary to develop and support software. This issue of the Journal of Systems and Software is based upon that Second Software Life Cycle Management Workshop. It contains a selected subset of papers that have been updated for presentation in this special issue. The first two papers are primarily concerned with management methodology. Tausworthe discusses the use of the work breakdown structure (WBS) for software management and McHenry and Rand present a disciplined methodology for integration engineering. The next three papers are concerned with the relationships of various factors during the life cycle. The paper by Boehm and Wolverton examines a set of criteria for software cost estimation. These criteria are related to their use in various cost models and examples are given of their importance. The paper by Thibodeau and Dodson discusses particular life cycle phase relationships in an attempt to isolate invariants for use in cost modeling. Lehman’s paper postulates a set of basic laws governing the maintenance phase of the life cycle. These laws are based upon a set of basic invariants that have been analyzed as they occur during the maintenance of varous software projects. The last four papers are all concerned with reliability modeling. Musa’s paper presents the results of testing his model on several software projects. Goel presents another reliability model along with its application to two software systems. Littlewood argues against the previous approaches in favor of a Bayesian model of reliability. The paper by Schick and Lin presents a methodology for assessing error distributions in reliability measurement. At least one other paper was not available in time for this special issue, but it is hoped that it will be published in a subsequent issue. Victor R. Basili