Testing and Evaluation Focus Day: Monday, April 27, 2009

Please click on the links below to learn more:

8:00 am – 8:30 am Registration & Coffee

8:30 am – 10:30 am Future Combat Systems: The Army's Transformation of Combat, Acquisition, and T&E

Future Combat Systems (FCS) is the Army's newest and largest acquisition program ever. The resulting materiel and operational organization and tactics will transform the future Nation's ground combat power. In addition, the FCS program management is transforming the way the DoD develops and acquires systems today. The FCS program is using a Lead System Intergrator management concept, rigorously applying systems engineering techniques to the development of a highly complex system of systems, and tightly integrating modeling and simulation and test and evaluation into all phases of the design and development as has never been done before. This presentation will discuss the rationale for, and challenges presented by, all of the above initiatives.

What will be covered:

• Gain an overall understanding for the rationale and intent for the unique aspects of the Army's FCS program management, development, and acquisition initiatives.
• Understand and appreciate the challenges that the above initiatives present, and learn how the FCS program is addressing these challenges.

How you will benefit:

• Receive first hand insights into Future Combat Systems
• Gain insight into how to apply system engineering best practices

Session Leaders:

C. David Brown, PhD PE; Contract Engineer to the MITRE Corporation and the Institute for Defense Analysis; Instructor in Systems Engineering and Project Management, Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering

Stephen Kreider Executive Director, Test Integration; Director, Future Combat Systems Combined Test Organization US Army

10:30 am - 12:30 pm Creating DoD Architectures with UPDM

Feeling like creating your DoDAF architecture takes longer than engineering your project? Creating DoDAF architectures is now dramatically faster! Learn the new UPDM standard implementation of DoDAF: how it works, advantages, and how it can save time and money. You will be trained to create all parts of the DoDAF architecture using a tool implementing the UPDM standard. The workshop includes how UPDM/DoDAF works, tool overview, techniques, and procedures while enhancing your understanding of DoDAF with a simple example.

What will be covered:

• Designing and evaluating the architecture before working on the system
• Techniques for translating the architecture into an engineer’s language and capabilities

How you will benefit:

• Learn about the new DoDAF implementation standard: UPDM
• Understand how UPDM and UML tools can increase your productivity
• Learn about various ways to create complete & verifiable DoD architectures, including Activity-Based Modeling

Session Leader:

Daniel Brookshire
Chief Architect
No Magic, Inc.

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm Lunch will be served

1:30 pm - 3:30 pm The Model-Driven Test Design Process

The past decade has seen enormous changes in how we develop and test software. Researchers have invented and matured numerous techniques and criteria to where they are now ready for use. During the same time, the need for reliable software has grown enormously. The user base is expanding, technological advances put software into more mission-critical locations, software continues to grow in complexity, and secure software must be correct software. This talk will discuss specific ways to improve software testing and thereby the safety and reliability of software: (1) we need more efficient and effective processes, (2) we need better developer testing, (3) testing / QA teams must have more technical knowledge, (4) students need better education, (5) we need significant investments in technology transition to improve software test tools.

What will be covered:

• Need for better reliability and testing
• A more effective and efficient way to structure testing and test teams
• Formal test criteria that are ready for prime time use

How you will benefit:

• An appreciation for how changes in software development effects testing
• An understanding of how to integrate new testing ideas and technologies into software development
• Knowledge of specific, effective, test criteria that can lead to better software

Session Leader:

Jeff Offutt
Professor of Software Engineering
George Mason University

3:30 pm – 5:30 pm Combinatorial Methods in Software Testing and Modeling & Simulation

Many software failures occur only as the result of an interaction between multiple components. Testers often use pairwise testing – all pairs of parameter values – to detect such interactions, but empirical evidence shows that some errors are triggered only by the interaction of three, four, or more parameters. These results have important implications for testing. If all faults in a system can be triggered by a combination of n or fewer parameters, then testing all n-way combinations of parameters can provide high confidence that nearly all faults have been discovered. This talk explains practical approaches to combinatorial testing for high assurance software.

What will be covered:

• Advantages and disadvantages of combinatorial testing
• Costs and volume of tests required
• Application to modeling and simulation
• Methods to automate checking correctness of output

How you will benefit:

• Gain insight into why pairwise testing is not sufficient and how higherstrength combinatorial testing works
• Learn how to determine the most cost-effective mode of combinatorial testing for a project
• Learn how to use these methods for more efficient modeling and simulation

Session Leaders:

D. Richard Kuhn Computer Scientist National Institute of Standards and Technology

Raghu Kacker, Ph.D. National Institute of Standards and Technology

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