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Hinchey, Michael

Publications and source records attributed to Hinchey, Michael.

Infusing Software Engineering Technology into Practice at NASA

We present an ongoing effort of the NASA Software Engineering Initiative to encourage the use of advanced software engineering technology on NASA projects. Technology infusion is in general a difficult process yet this effort seems to have found a modest approach that is successful for some types of technologies. We outline the process and describe the experience of the technology infusions that occurred over a two year period. We also present some lessons from the experiences.

software assurance

Infusing Software Assurance Research Techniques into Use

Research in the software engineering community continues to lead to new development techniques that encompass processes, methods and tools. However, a number of obstacles impede their infusion into software development practices. These are the recurring obstacles common to many forms of research. Practitioners cannot readily identify the emerging techniques that may benefit them, and cannot afford to risk time and effort evaluating and trying one out while there remains uncertainty about whether it will work for them. Researchers cannot readily identify the practitioners whose problems would be amenable to their techniques, and, lacking feedback from practical applications, are hard-pressed to gauge the where and in what ways to evolve their techniques to make them more likely to be successful. This paper describes an ongoing effort conducted by a software engineering research infusion team established by NASA s Software Engineering Initiative to overcome these obstacles. .

Pressburger, Thomas

Infusing software assurance research techniques into use

Research in the software engineering community continues to lead to new development techniques that encompass processes, methods and tools. However, a number of obstacles impede their infusion into software deveopment practices. This paper describes an ongoing effort conducted by a software engineering research infusion team established by NASA's Software Engineering Intiative to overcome these obstacles.

Trevino, Luis C.

Proceedings 3rd NASA/IEEE Workshop on Formal Approaches to Agent-Based Systems (FAABS-III)

These preceedings contain 18 papers and 4 poster presentation, covering topics such as: multi-agent systems, agent-based control, formalism, norms, as well as physical and biological models of agent-based systems. Some applications presented in the proceedings include systems analysis, software engineering, computer networks and robot control.

Hinchey, Michael

Experience Using Formal Methods for Specifying a Multi-Agent System

The process and results of using formal methods to specify the Lights Out Ground Operations System (LOGOS) is presented in this paper. LOGOS is a prototype multi-agent system developed to show the feasibility of providing autonomy to satellite ground operations functions at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). After the initial implementation of LOGOS the development team decided to use formal methods to check for race conditions, deadlocks and omissions. The specification exercise revealed several omissions as well as race conditions. After completing the specification, the team concluded that certain tools would have made the specification process easier. This paper gives a sample specification of two of the agents in the LOGOS system and examples of omissions and race conditions found. It concludes with describing an architecture of tools that would better support the future specification of agents and other concurrent systems.

Rouff, Christopher