Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Some acquisitions by large companies benefit both, and some are not so suc-
cessful. In the case of Rational and IBM, there appears to be a useful synergy. Ra-
tional has continued to add new tools and methods, and IBM has benefited from
the Rational technology stack. Rational has also benefited from the effectiveness
of the IBM marketing and sales engines.
An endemic problem of the software industry is the tunnel vision of too many
companies and consultants that offer “solutions” to software problems. For ex-
ample, the static analysis companies concentrate only on static analysis. The auto-
mated test tool companies only think about testing. The Agile coaches only think
about Agile.
Rational has perhaps the widest range of tools and methods of any company
that concentrates on improving software development. They have requirements
tools and methods, architecture, design, code, static analyses for both text docu-
ments and code, integration, defect tracking, and many more. It is refreshing to see
a group that recognizes that good software requires a combination of many partial
solutions and not some kind of silver bullet. If the solutions are cohesive and work
well together, that is even better.
SEI
During the 1980s, the Department of Defense (DoD) continued as the world's
largest user of computers and software. The DoD and the military services also
built very large applications, some of which topped 100,000 function points in size
or more than 10 million source code statements. These big systems had a distress-
ing tendency to be late and not work well when delivered.
To help improve the technologies of software engineering, the Defense Ad-
vanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded the creation of SEI in 1984.
SEI was located partly on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania.
SEI was not a normal venture- or equity-funded company but rather a federally
funded research and development center. SEI became an important software re-
search group serving initially the DoD and military contractors, but it eventually
expanded to other software industries outside of defense.
The most famous of the SEI software approaches was the widely used Capab-
ility Maturity Model originally called by its initials (CMM) and later adding the
word “integrated” to become CMMI when it expanded to include system engineer-
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