Maintenance in a dual-lifecycle software engineering process

Dual-lifecycle software processes have the potential to significantly improve the way in which suites of software applications are generated and sustained. However, several outstanding issues need to be more adequately addressed before the full potential of this philosophy can be realized. Detailed strategies for maintaining domain architectures in parallel with suites of fielded applications are at present particularly conspicuous by their absence. In this paper, we present a dual-lifecycle maintenance process that was developed for the ROSE (Reusable Object Software Engineering) project, a major reengineering and repository-building effort in the domain of flight design and dynamics. We present the major features of the process, the rationale behind these features, and changes which we feel would be beneficial based on lessons learned from the application of the process. The process is presented using a variant of the Fusion object-oriented design method known as Profusion.