Business and System Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA) Service

The senior engineers employed by SW Complete have provided domain understanding, requirements analysis, complex problem solving, business process reengineering, and process improvement strategies to meet the demands of an evolving information age within the NSA/CSS Enterprise. Our experience working side-by-side with Government and commercial customers to help shape their approach to systems engineering has given us valuable insight into what is required to successfully implement process improvement changes. By using our own development process as a starting point for our customers, we establish confidence in the success of each customer's project. Our team’s experience derives from software development contracts which require us to successfully deliver software on-time and on-budget, improving software development and earned value management practices. Our approach to reengineering also enhances documentation of existing processes, and where needed, creates and documents new processes, to develop an integrated, cohesive, software and systems engineering capability.

Engineering Services

We have mentored and assisted NSA in its mission by applying our engineering services to improve capabilities for exploitation, target access, team collaboration, rapid response, analysis tools, data dissemination, and overall situational awareness, internally, as well as with NSA' s other government customers in a globally networked and integrated environment. We have applied experience with J2EE technologies and distributed computing for high-availability systems that directly support the goals of the NSA mission.

Within the theme of the Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) “Reuse Everything,” we employ several technical approaches depending on the engineering life cycle to achieve an effective system and software reuse practice, all with off-the-shelf open source software tools:

• Identify small components reused with components (utilities)
• Identify larger successful groups of components (promote frameworks)
• Create parameterized versions of components used across existing systems (create frameworks, enhance components)
• Participate in domain analysis sessions for identifying existing architectures and solutions within the enterprise that solve some or all of the issues within the domain (mining, reengineering)
• Provide consulting during domain analysis, and system reengineering to abstract out refined system requirements for future domain-specific software architecture development (domain-based reuse engineering)
• Reuse and support successful approaches and processes within the enterprise
• Support existing reusable assets; incorporate software assets into intranet distribution services
• Perform issue tracking with full reporting capability
• Implement software changes
• Configuration management
• Life cycle planning
• Provide technical support for finding and integrating assets into specific projects
• Provide cross-project abstractions in areas outside software engineering which include process improvement and project management (CMMI)

Our proven software methodology emphasizes measurable results through continuous feedback, small development iterations, rapid prototyping and frequent deliveries to the customer. Each delivery includes auto-generated metrics of project velocity and expected results. Our software developers have supported the NSA and commercial customers in the development of custom web-based applications, employing web-enabled technologies such as Enterprise Java Beans, application servers, Java Server Pages, JavaScript, XML, and XSL translations. We also have designed, implemented and delivered client-server, n-tier, distributed architectures on a variety of platforms in use today at NSA.

Information Technology Services

SW Complete has provided information technology services to both commercial and government customers since 2001. Our practical, hands-on approach to enabling technologies in support of distributed application development through the use of web/e-commerce applications, is directly applicable to the NSA services need. Specifically, our staff has applied state-of-the-art information technology solutions by performing these activities:

• Re-implemented consumer auction site using Java Server Pages (JSP) and Java Servlets to provide auction site networking, new auction models, XML interfaces, automated object-relational mapping, and database portability.
• Developed system components for enterprise portal application using J2EE technologies for NSA Initial Transformation Activity; deployed web applications for use inside and outside the portal. Commercial products used include Sybase Enterprise Application Server, Sybase Enterprise Portal, BEA Weblogic, Oracle, PL/SQL
• Provided object-oriented technology mentoring to help seed an organization’s development team’s approach for software development and maintenance.
• Provided software process improvements, such as peer review, distributed source-code control, scripted software release management, wide-spread adoption of unit-testing, similar to Extreme Programming (XP).
• Performed software product testing and evaluation to make technical recommendations to the customer whether or not the tools provide overall value to their organization, based on current requirements and projections for future growth/utilization. Tools evaluated include: integrated development environments (IDEs), automated test, performance/optimization, configuration management, object-oriented analysis/design (UML), J2EE application servers, open source frameworks, and Python GUI toolkits.
• Integrated network system components using BEA Weblogic, JBoss, Tomcat, Java Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE), and MQ Series middleware.

Operations Support Services

In addition to developing custom software solutions, we provide on-site acceptance testing, installation support, and operator training. SW Complete staff have trained the operators responsible for operating, managing, monitoring, and configuring the delivered systems on a daily basis. Training courses typically include the following topics:

• Basic Hardware and Operation
• Basic Operating System Operation
• Startup
• Monitoring
• Configuration
• Backup
• Recovery
• Troubleshooting

Tracking changes to the system once it has been deployed and is operational is key to quality lifecycle support. We employ strict configuration management practices before, during and after system development, to ensure 100% mission success.

Training Services

SW Complete takes great pride in our reputation for customer support and training. We have experience with on-site training and mentoring in support of the understanding of software architectures, object-oriented analysis and design, programming, process improvement, configuration management, software testing, and lifecycle support. Our staff has experience teaching within the NCS, developing courses in object-oriented software development, UML, C++, Java/J2EE, including XML, HTML, web services and service-oriented architectures. We have also provided end-user training in a number of domains, including data visualization, air traffic control, office automation, project scheduling, and customer relationship management.