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NASA's Johnson Space Center, USA
"Continuus' configuration management software provides us with a flexible solution that does not constrain the project to the vendor's view of configuration management, plus, we can change the system as new requirements evolve. It is an open solution which will link to other development tools as well."
Jeff Bloom, Research Engineer, CM Administrator
Rockwell International, ROSE Project, NASA's Johnson Space Center
Rockwell International, a diversified high technology company, is responsible for the Reusable Objects Software Environment (Rose) project, currently under NASA to streamline its software development and maintenance efforts within the Flight Design and Dynamics group. This group builds and maintains software used for trajectory planning and analysis, navigation flight preparation, and near real-time flight dynamic support of space shuttle missions.
Sixty-two full and part time users, as well as developers are using Continuus configuration management products today on SUN Sparc stations running the UNIX operation system.
The software which supports the Flight Design and Dynamics (FDD) system used for NASA's space shuttle program originally comprised a group of software tools and applications developed using a variety of methodologies and programming languages. The separate and proprietary nature of these systems made the software system difficult to use and costly to maintain.
Rockwell, in association with the Software Technology Branch at NASA, chose re-engineering the entire development environment and the application for this group. Dubbed ROSE, this project will bring NASA's current FDD software into a consistent architecture and design framework, enabling engineers to more effectively develop and maintain FDD systems easier, faster , and less expensively. This will also enable the group to move towards level three and four of the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) capability maturity model, an important requirement for government contractors.
With ROSE, every aspect within the software development process will be re-engineered, from the team's approach to project management, to the specific development tools used.
ROSE selected Continuus/CM as its software configuration management system because it met several key requirements. First, the team wanted a commercially available tool which could support both change management (problem tracking and task management) and configuration management. The solution needed to streamline and auto-mate the process of software development and maintenance, without constraining the team to the vendor's view of configuration management. Additionally , the new solution needed to integrate seamlessly with other development tools and utilities.
ROSE is currently implementing Continuus/Cm with a first phase implementation, and will use the tool's "out-of-the-box" model with minor refinement and enhancement to the user and workflow rules. Follow-on phase will include the other ROSE development tools and the automation of tasks, such as metric generation, collection, storage, and reporting.
While the full impact of the ROSE project will be felt during the next few years, Rockwell has already seen the immediate benefits of using Continuus with its team-driven approach. Namely, team members are involved in more facets of the project, they are willing to assist in areas that were unfamiliar with, and the ease-of-use-use has generated the enthusiasm needed to re-engineer 2.8 million lines of code.
File Date: 09/18/95