This article describes two dimensions beyond scope, budget, and schedule for software project management.

This article presents two techniques to keep teams moving forward when faced with incomplete or missing information.

This article presents my top three all-time reading recommendations.

The paper presents Business Process Optimization (BPO) as the next phase in the evolution of process automation technologies. A definition is presented along with a domain analysis that provides a path forward in the realm of process automation.

In this paper, we present a set of recommendations with the goal of accelerating the development of integrations with web-based interfaces. These accelerators were constructed over decades of system integration experience and recently re-validated on a real-world project. While the focus of this effort was on integration development, most of the accelerators can be applied on other types of software development.

While the solution space for software development is constantly updated with new technologies, the requirements and artifacts of the problem space can appear to be timeless. Even with cutting edge technologies like the AWS serverless stack, software developers are still burden with vintage entities like document and image files. The patterns presented in this paper cover uploading documents to a private S3 bucket by multiple users, allowing read access to a subset of the user population, and manipulating the documents in a serverless realm.

The Common Access Card (CAC) is a “smart” card and provides standard identification for active and reserve military personnel, Department of Defense civilian employees, and eligible contractors. The paper describes three cloud-based architectures that were developed to integrate the CAC in the security service of a web application. The first two versions relied on NGINX, Docker, and AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS). The latest version is based on AWS serverless stack including API Gateway, Lambda, and S3. All of the versions used GitLab and its CI/CD pipeline service.

The Physiological Analysis Tool (PAT) was a recent proof-of-concept project at SOFWERX that explored the limits of hosting multiple physiological and sentiment analysis systems on an on-body computing platform. Five different sentiment-based systems along with three physiological measurement tools were incorporated into a system that can concurrently analyze the same event. To accommodate this wide spectrum of technologies, a heterogeneous platform was developed that integrates Android, Ubuntu, and Windows computing environments with two point-to-point cable-based connections. The architecture of this system is presented in this document.

This project presents a serverless implementation of a notes management application. We started with the example from the Serverless Stack guide and evolved it to fit our requirements. The client project uses Nodejs, React, Amplify, and CloudFront while the service project utilizes Cognito, API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and Python. The two projects are maintained in GitLab and uses its CI/CD pipeline feature. This project deviated from the Serverless Stack guide in the use of GitLab instead of GitHub and Python instead of Nodejs for the Lambda language.

The Clockwerx project started with the desire to program a set of wall mounted clocks via a web application. After a false start, the architecture was refactored to include a web application based on a React stack to provide a user interface. A web service based on a Flask stack was selected to provide the interface to the clock display mechanism. Both of these services are embedded in Docker containers and hosted on a Raspberry Pi computer. This document presents an overview of the architecture and several tips and details for building out a similar system.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) processes have been at the forefront of the software development industry for several years now. While CI/CD concepts are easy to grasp, they can be difficult to implement while maintaining schedules and achieving milestones. This paper describes our initial steps toward a CI/CD pipeline for our client facing websites that use WordPress and SiteGround. We incorporate GitHub’s repository to maintain our source code while using GitHub’s Actions service to automate the deployment to a staging environment hosted by SiteGround.

A recent project at SOFWERX relied on IR to remotely control a target device. In theory, the approach was attractive but, in practice, the original version proved to be unreliable. This paper describes an approach to increase the stability of this type of computer interface by validating the IR signal transmission using python custom code and the Linux Infrared Remote Control (LIRC) software.

The ATAK Low Latency Camera Platform (ALLCaP) is a proof of concept that provides near real-time video display. The viewing device is an ATAK enabled tablet or phone while the video source is a USB-based camera or another ATAK enabled device. This approach does not rely on signaling, discovery, or intermediary servers and can be used with Wi-Fi or software defined radio (SDR) radios. The project uses the Android Team Awareness Kit, UV4L, and webrtc-streamer software.

This paper presents how Finite State Models (FSM) can be utilized to increase the knowledge and specification of the problem domain and drive the design of React/Redux-based software in the solution domain.

Zero Trust Networks (ZTN) represent a new wave of network security technology. The mantra with this approach is “Never trust, always verify”. This paper describes a Zero Trust Network implementation constructed using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with open source, community version, and custom software. The key components include Drools, XGBoost, NGINX, Mender, and WSO2 hosted on AWS EC2 instances.

This is a consolidated step-by-step guide that configures a blank Raspberry Pi to send a message to a service within the AWS cloud in a secure, reliable, and widely acceptable fashion.

This paper presents a circuit for detecting a light source and the interruption of that light source. Visual indication of the light source is provided by a LED. The circuit also signifies when the light source is interrupted by illuminating a different LED for a few seconds before resetting.

NoSQL databases represent a fascinating technology and Amazon Web Services DynamoDB, with its performance features and extremely low cost, is a very interesting option. To facilitate the evaluation and potential transition to DynamoDB, this document presents a modeling approach that is straightforward and consistent. A sample problem is presented along with the logical view of the data. The physical view of the table is created by following a set of design rules. The Python code used to create and query the table is also presented.

This paper presents several business process management (BPM) model patterns that were identified and leveraged during client engagements. The objective of this document is to assist someone new to BPM modeling to realize the same benefits that my clients did without the same learning curve.

This document examines the concepts presented in the “Team of Teams” book by General Stanley McChrystal and evaluates them for large scale software development. In 2003, General McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force. At that time, the Task Force was a hierarchical, highly disciplined organization of thousands of men and women. To defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Task Force leadership had to transform this command and control structure based on decades of refinement and principles to an agile, responsive, and adaptable network, a Team of Teams.

Monitoring simple transaction processes is easy, but monitoring complex processes is difficult. When the complex process spans multiple Commercial-Off The-Shelf (COTS) systems that provide little support for interoperability, the monitoring tasks becomes very, very difficult. This paper describes how the XML Transaction Monitor (XTM) project faced challenges related to inter-system transaction monitoring, and how the Physhun framework proved an integral component in the overall solution.

Processes involving multiple steps that require decision points within and outside of each step can be inordinately complex to program. But this type of process modeling has long-established solutions in computing. This article presents the Physhun project, a Spring-based framework for implementing complex processes through Finite State Machine models. Physhun provides finite State Model persistence and transaction management with synchronous or asynchronous behavior.

This paper presents the unique way Wazee Group automated the processing of grand format printers and dramatically raised the throughput of the nation's leading billboard printer.

Wazee Group has developed the Rebate Forecasting & Management (RFM) tool that allows companies to easily and accurately manage their rebate programs. This software increases the accuracy of the forecasts, simplifies the data entry tasks, and offers greater insight into the rebate domain.

WinApp Navigator is a graphical development and maintenance environment for complex integrations with Windows applications. WinApp Navigator is a powerful utility that can be used to automate human user tasks within Windows applications in order to join them into larger, integrated systems.

The architecture of the xBroker™ is based on a web services paradigm with a J2EE architecture. The client applications can request for a service to be performed and the xBroker™ system will carry out the required processing. At the completion of the processing the xBroker™ will return a reply and any associated data to the client application.

Legacy Navigator enables development of robust, flexible integrations to terminal based legacy systems through the original user interface. It consists of a graphical development and maintenance environment and runtime libraries. It is a powerful utility that can be used to automate integrations with terminal based applications in order to connect them into larger, integrated systems. Additionally, Legacy Navigator can be leveraged to turn existing legacy systems into Web Services, add modern user interfaces to legacy systems and otherwise extend the lifetime and usefulness of existing legacy systems quickly, easily and at a low cost.

This paper presents a view that software development should shift to object-oriented programming (OOP), object-oriented analysis (OOA), and Recursive Design (RD).

The Locomotion Emulator (LE) is a mobile robot testbed that overcomes limitations of previous testbeds. The LE consists of a locomotor, a mechanism capable of completely general locomotion on a surface, and an emulator, a software environment that specializes this mechanism to mimic the characteristics of different vehicles. The LE’s general locomotion can subtend all the trajectories important to navigational research. This paper discusses the need for such a vehicle and describes the LE mechanism and software.

The Field Robotics Center (FRC) at Carnegie-Mellon University develops mobile, perceptive, forceful robots for duty in unpredictable environments such as unstructured work sites and natural terrain. This paper presents an overview of those robots.

The Field Robotics Center (FRC) at Carnegie-Mellon University develops mobile, perceptive, forceful robots for duty in unpredictable environments such as unstructured work sites and natural terrain. This paper presents an overview of those robots.