Software timeline

The reason I include this seemingly irrelevant chapter in this book is because it is important. What are the factors that make a software project succeed One could say the project has to provide good business values. In addition, the project team has to be technically competent. Although these factors are all necessary for the project to succeed, they are not sufficient. Especially for a software project that has some level of complexity, tight timelines, and resource constraints, a good development process is also critical. Unless your development process is ad hoc, most likely you will use either the waterfall or the iterative development process. Many researchers show that the latter is a much better choice than the former, and many thoughtful leaders advocate its use in most software development projects. 

In this journey, we will first cover Upjohn/Pharmacia s systems Cousin (1981-2001) and ChemLink (2001-2003). We will then discnss several less successfnl attempts at development including Pfizer s RGATE (2003-2004) and Lilly s Beacon Software (2001-2005). Finally, we will describe the snccessful development and deployment of Lilly s Mobins system (2005 till present). We will then summarize and highlight some of the most important lessons learned over the many years concerning the development and deployment of CIDBSs. To facilitate a better understanding of this history of development, a timeline is included in Figure 14.1. 

To support applications with either very short timelines (such as point defense against low-flying missiles) or high-density multiple-target tracking, the radar control process must be automated as the requisite decision rate exceeds that which can be accommodated by an operator. Human operator intervention can be essential in coping with target and environmental parameters that are outside the nominal bounds implicit in the radar software. 

Figure 8 Patrick s timelines (Technical Specialist, Electronics and Software Systems expertise).

A timeline aims to review a series of ordered events that occur in the life cycle of an entity under study. The entity is a subject that carries a certain function the user needs and has its own life cycle, e.g. a system, a subsystem, a component, a software module, or a variable. The timeline for a system could be the whole product life-cycle or part of it, e.g. its development process, or its installation, operation and decommissioning process. The decomposition of a safety claim is realized by considering the claim at different stages in a timeline. The argument over a system task profile is also an example of the argument over a timeline. 

The incident investigation showed that the algorithm in the FPCP software had a serious limitation, which meant that in a very specific situation multiple spikes on the AOA signal from only one of the ADlRUs could generate a nose-down elevator command. A timeline for the event is shown in Fig. 5.3. 

Figure 1 shows a timeline with the evolution of our software and main milestones. The first versions of our software were based on Orbix (C+-b) on Irix, Solaris and Windows NT 4. Orbix is a commercial product and does not provide any way to customize it. EHie to this, we ported our software to TAO 1.1.16 (2001). The development environment used on Windows was Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0. 

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