Recent Industrial Presentations

DOJO Consortium, Minneapolis
Jane Cleland-Huang, Agile Story Pyramids

Agile approaches are increasingly used for projects in safety-critical, high-performance, and rapidly changing market environments. In such environments developers may need to build safety-cases, or to ensure that architectural qualities are maintained as the system evolves. Story Pyramids provide a light-weight, customizable, and highly targeted solution for achieving this goal. Starting with a single story of particular importance to the system, we generate a pyramid that captures and visualizes the reach of the story throughout the system. The pyramid brings many benefits such as increasing comprehension of the as-is system and providing a useful tool for understanding change impact and preserving system qualities. In this talk, Jane Cleland-Huang will demonstrate the use of Story Pyramids for two different applications -- to support safety analysis and to preserve architectural qualities. Examples will be drawn from the UAV domain based on experiences developing the Dronology system to manage and control Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Emergency Response scenarios. A pdf of the slides is available here .

Gothenburg Industry Seminar
Jane Cleland-Huang, Cracking the Big Freeze! Traceability Solutions for High-Dependability Agile Projects

The cost and effort to establish and maintain accurate and complete software traceability in an evolving software system can be extremely daunting - making it difficult for manufacturers and certifiers to fully understand the extent to which safety hazards have been mitigated. This has led to a phenomenon known as the "Big Freeze" in which the significant cost and effort of certifying a high-dependability system hinders the release of new features, frustrates competitiveness, and retards time to market. The problem is exacerbated in agile development environments characterized by fast-paced, iterative, and incremental releases. In this talk Dr. Cleland-Huang will present cutting edge traceability solutions that are well suited for use in agile projects, discuss state-of-the-art solutions for creating and evolving trace links within an agile project environment, and show how they can be used to construct and maintain a current and accurate safety case. Techniques discussed in the talk will be illustrated with examples from the Dronology System which is designed to manage and coordinate the use of Unmanned Aerial Systems in emergency response scenarios. here.

Chicago Agile Day, 2016
Jane Cleland-Huang, Agile Goes Critical!

Present day agile processes have greatly matured to the extent that organizations who have traditionally used waterfall approaches are actively experimenting with agile methods even across relatively high-criticality domains. At the same time, organizations experienced in agile development are increasingly building Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) such as factory floor robots, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), and medical devices, often without the knowledge or instrumentation to adopt appropriate hazard analysis and safety assurance practices. These two trends -- emerging from opposite ends of the process spectrum are pointing to a new way of developing safety-critical software which embraces the rigor of safety critical development environments while experiencing the benefits of more incremental, faster delivery cycles made possible by agile solutions. The challenge is to develop software incrementally with faster release cycles and without any loss of safety; however,this requires new agile solutions customized to support rigorous safety assurance processes that include establishing sound traceability practices and constructing safety cases. This presentation introduces initial ideas for hardening the agile life-cycle. A pdf of the slides is available here.