Tailoring Cleanroom for Industrial Use

aytheon Systems Company, a defense electronics firm, typifies many US Defense Department environments in its strong, process-oriented development strategy. The company has been actively engaged in software process improvement at the organizational and project levels for over a decade. Raytheon bases its efforts on the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model, and our segment of the company has been formally assessed at level 3 (defined). The project I'm involved with is a real-time embedded software application using a heterogeneous computer architecture: a single-board PowerPC using Ada for embedded command and control, and digital signal processors running applications written in C. There are significant real-time constraints within the signal processing application. To meet competitive pressures, the project's management team sought strategies to improve productivity and increase the quality of the software we deliver to our system integration and test lab. The most important consideration was the need for high-quality, low-defect software that would require little or no rework. Raytheon chose our project to pilot a CMM level 4 (managing) and 5 (optimizing) environment. We are now implementing the respective key process areas—in-cluding components of continuous process improvement, process optimization, and process measurement and analysis. The project follows a tailored version of DoD STD-2167A and MIL-STD-498 documentation standards, and is built upon an Integrated Product Team structure. IPTs are management processes that integrate R As with any other methodology, a cer tain degree of tailoring is required for a Cleanroom approach to be most effective in soft ware engineering. We have done so based on project needs, cost and schedule constraints, and comfor t level. The result is an effective model for developing qualit y soft ware, especially in the areas of requirements analysis and specifications development.