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SEEWeb - An Internet Solution
Steven J. Rheintgen
Advanced Software Technology
Lockheed Martin Tactical Defense Systems
USA
steven.j.rheintgen@lmco.com
The Advanced Software Technology (AST) group of Lockheed Martin Tactical Defense Systems has developed
a tailorable web based environment known as the SEEWeb. The SEEWeb provides access to an organization’s
Software Engineering Environment (SEE) through the World Wide Web. This paper delves further into the
SEEWeb psychic by exploring the problems it solves, the technical mechanisms by which the problem is solved
and how the SEEWeb is being employed to support real world projects.
The problem is how to provide a widely diverse and geographically dispersed group of engineers, managers,
and customers with accurate knowledge required to develop and evolve software, tailored to each user’s unique
perspective, and provided it in a cost effective manner. This problem is especially acute in stream-lined
acquisition projects, where the Government is looking for less burdensome yet effective approaches to
oversight. Traditional hard copy documentation and reporting practices are labor intensive, expensive and
produce materials that are often outdated sometimes as they are even completed.
Confronted with this problem, the Advanced Software Technology (AST) group developed the SEEWeb. The
high-bandwidth electronic SEEWeb interface replaces the traditional, expensive, paper-based customercontractor
interface and provides both customer and contractor management with direct visibility into the state
of a system or software engineering project.
Conceptually, the SEEWeb is organized into three high-level areas as shown in Figure 1: Project, Product and
Process. Project area contains knowledge related to project management, such as, plans and schedules.
Process area shows the mechanism used to develop products. Product area contains the collection customer
required project outputs. Figure 1 represents the starting point for SEEWeb navigation. The key building
blocks of the SEEWeb are the ubiquitous World Wide Web and an organization’s SEE. A user, with an
engineering, management, or customer perspective, that has access to a browser, can dynamically obtain the
latest and most accurate knowledge for a software project.
The SEEWeb strives to present knowledge where existing SEEs provide information and CASE tools only
provide data. For example, a requirements management tool can produce the data: 3452 requirements in the
database at the moment. A SEE with integrated tools might produce the additional information that there were
3426 requirements in the database last Friday and 14 requirements have been added in the last week.
SEEWebs will present knowledge:
The requirements are stabilizing. The rate at which new requirements are added has decreased over
the last three weeks. The rate at which requirements are being consolidated has also decreased over
the last week. Based on staff activities and historical data, we believe that the trend we’re
experiencing is an indicator that the requirements are well-enough understood and captured to create
a baseline so that we can move on to the next phase.
This kind of knowledge would most likely be placed in the SEEWeb as an annotation by a project member. A
less comprehensive version might eventually be derived from the SEE, through the use of automated
mechanisms to gather metrics and analyze them in the context of historical information.
The browser provides platform independence. The knowledge being presented to the user is extracted and
synthesized from the SEE in real-time. This electronic approach provides a single mechanism for intersection
between these viewpoints getting total visibility into up-to-date process-, project-, and product-level knowledge
and the areas of intersection between these viewpoints.