TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems, Materials/Processes

ACQUISITION PROGRAM: JTRS-TD ACAT I

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: The Artifact Assessment Tool Suite Infrastructure (AATSI) allows for the deployment, execution and storage of the results obtained from independent, self-contained compliance and quality assessment tools. Compliance and assessment tools are used in the evaluation of design documents, models, source code, meta-data, product build services and other electronic artifacts created and maintained over the life-cycle of software centered systems. These tools assess artifacts against evaluation criteria derived from regulations, program requirements, customer needs and industry standards. The AATSI framework shall support integration of assessment tools and services from commercial, open source and locally developed resources and provide a common open architecture for the process, storage and retrieval and analysis of tool results. The infrastructure will permit organizations responsible for product life-cycle support to select and integrate the �best-of-breed� tools and services into their development and oversight process freeing them to capitalize their investment independent of limited proprietary or close single source solutions. In addition, this tool will incorporate capabilities specific to embedded real-time systems which utilize different operating systems and techniques than the majority of the commercial and military software products.

DESCRIPTION: AATSI will support compliance and quality assessment analysis of digital artifacts produced for all phases of code intensive product development, particularly code intended for embedded real-time systems. The AATSI system should provide a multi-tiered infrastructure to support �plugging together� commercial, open source and privately developed compliance and quality assessments tools into a common framework. This framework should support data collection, retention, and data reduction as well as analysis report generation for input produced by tools or �content providers�. The framework should utilize an open common language such as XML to describe the input, query and report criteria to be implemented by content providers and data requestors. The use of open language description may promote acceptance by content providers� thereby stimulating support for common data interchange. Similar service capabilities are under development in projects such as the �Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform (TPTP)�. This investigation should examine opportunities to extend these capabilities to provide historical reporting and tracking for the life cycle of the products. The system should support rapid processing and generation of either artifacts in either an "in batch" mode, or by individual elements. Artifacts may include source code, meta-data, build scripts, project documentation, architectural drawings and legal contracts. There can be any number of tool results associated with an artifact that shall be stored and queried by relational criteria provided by open schema definitions defined by the AATSI service framework. All AATSI support schemas, data and meta-data used to describe projects, artifacts, tests and results must be open and readily available for integration with assessment tools and reporting services. The design of the AATSI should be scalable and include operational capabilities for single workstation implementations through distributed web services capable tools and distribution.

PHASE I: Survey industry and available technology, determine feasibility and develop system concept and architecture. Develop an infrastructure design road map to support the iterative development and architecture to support the evolution of the product. Deliver a proposal to develop a prototype system in Phase II.

PHASE II: Implement the prototype of the architecture defined in Phase I. Provide plug-in adaptors for a sampling of existing commercial assessment and compliance products to demonstrate the usability of the framework design. Provide minimal query and reporting capabilities to demonstrate the flexibility of framework data store associations. Deliver a specification and cost estimate to complete the development of the capability in Phase III.

PHASE III: Expand the prototype development of Phase II to support the integration of tools, chains and other specialized compliance assessment services utilized by the JPO JTRS, Life Cycle Support organization and other JPO JTRS testing organizations. These tools will be used by government laboratoroies and industry vendors to support the quality assurance processing and report generation service needs of the JTRS family of radios and support products.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: Compliance testing and quality assessment tools are widely available for many commercial software applications, but the lack of standards and proprietary product solutions limit the integration and distribution of information for business analysis in major multi-vendor open-source programs. There are number of initiatives such as the Eclipse TPTP currently underway to provide frameworks for the integration of tooling for specific problem domains. However, the products developed under this effort have the potential of extending capabilities to support integration of product quality information and history across the business domain, including embedded and real-time systems used increasingly in commercial and non-DOD interoperable communication system, sophisticated transportation systems, and increasingly complex consumer handheld devices.

REFERENCES: 1) Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/
2) Netcentric Enterprise Solutions for Interoperablitity (NESI) http://nesipublic.spawar.navy.mil/
3) Web Services http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/

KEYWORDS: Software; quality, compliance, testing, artifact, JTRS

TPOC: David Frank
Phone: (619) 553-4167
Fax:
Email: [email protected]

** TOPIC AUTHOR (TPOC) **

DoD Notice:   Between April 12, 2007 and May 13, 2007, you may talk directly with the Topic Author(s) to ask technical questions about the topics. Their contact information is listed above. For reasons of competitive fairness, direct communication between proposers and topic authors is not allowed starting May 14, 2007, when DoD begins accepting proposals for this solicitation.

However, proposers may still submit written questions about solicitation topics through the SBIR/STTR Interactive Topic Information System (SITIS), in which the questioner and respondent remain anonymous and all questions and answers are posted electronically for general viewing until the solicitation closes. All proposers are advised to monitor SITIS (07.2 Q&A) during the solicitation period for questions and answers, and other significant information, relevant to the SBIR 07.2 topic under which they are proposing.

If you have general questions about DoD SBIR program, please contact the DoD SBIR Help Desk at (866) 724-7457 or email weblink.