Angelo Messina

Defence & Security Software Engineers Association

Innopolis is a new IT city incorporating a technopark and a university, aiming at prioritizing the development of IT and software engineering in Tatarstan and in the Russian Federation. Innopolis University (IU) is a young university pioneering several research and pedagogical projects and experiments with innovative teaching methods and curricula....

In the modern strategic scenarios, military operations are more and more complex, in particular when compliance with the so called “soft power” (DIME – Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic) is required. Because of this, military doctrine and, in particular, the support at the Command and Control are obliged to a continuous evolution, tryi...

The Theory of Affordances considers the interaction between the people and their environment based on their mental models of the environment. This study analyses a software development process on the theory of affordances. The LC2EVO software has been developed in Italy. There were two onsite team groups located five kilometers apart in separate bu...

Terrorism has become one of the most tedious problems to deal with and a prominent threat to mankind. To enhance counter-terrorism, several research works are developing efficient and precise systems, data mining is not an exception. Immense data is floating in our lives, though the scarce availability of authentic terrorist attack data in the publ...

SEDA 2018 was held at the premises of the Italian Defence General Secretariat (Segretariato Generale della Difesa) and the main military body actively supporting the conference was the Land Armament Directorate (Direzione Armamenti Terrestri). This is an important evolution of the Italian SEDA military community, as it shows that the interest for t...

Terrorism has become one of the most tedious problems to deal with and a prominent threat to mankind. To enhance counter-terrorism, several research works are developing efficient and precise systems, data mining is not an exception. Immense data is floating in our lives, though the scarce availability of authentic terrorist attack data in the publ...

Terrorism has become one of the most tedious problems to deal with and a prominent threat to mankind. To enhance counter-terrorism, several research works are developing efficient and precise systems, data mining is not an exception. Immense data is floating in our lives, though the scarce availability of authentic terrorist attack data in the publ...

The Theory of Affordances considers the interaction between the people and their environment based on their mental models of the environment. This study analyses a software development process on the theory of affordances. The LC2EVO software has been developed in Italy. There were two onsite team groups located five kilometers apart in separate bu...

Innopolis is a new IT city incorporating a technopark and a university, aiming at prioritizing the development of IT and software engineering in Tatarstan and in the Russian Federation. Innopolis University (IU) is a young university pioneering several research and peda-gogical projects and experiments with innovative teaching methods and curricula...

This chapter explains how a mission critical Knowledge-Based System (KBS) has been designed and implemented within a real case study of a governamental organization. Moreover, the KBS has been developed using a novel agile software development methodology. Due to fast changing operational scenarios and volatile requirements, traditional procedural...

Software Engineering aims at modeling, managing and implementing software development products and processes in a structured and supportable way, these aspects in the Defense & Security compartment assume high level of importance/criticism, where are required high reliability/quality levels, not comparable with commercial standards. DSSEA , The Ita...

Although Agile is a well established software development paradigm, major concerns arise when it comes to contracting issues between a software consumer and a software producer. How to contractualize the Agile production of software, especially for security & mission critical organizations, which typically outsource software projects, has been a ma...

The United States Government has created the Open Government Innovations Gallery (US Government 2009a). President Obama has also launched the SAVE Award (for ideas to save taxpayer dollars and make government more effective and efficient) and has released A Strategy for American Innovation, committing to increasing the innovation capability of the...

This book presents high-quality original contributions on new software engineering models, approaches, methods, and tools and their evaluation in the context of defence and security applications. In addition, important business and economic aspects are discussed, with a particular focus on cost/benefit analysis, new business models, organizational...

This chapter describes our experience of adopting agile project management in a software development project in the defense context. Adopting an agile approach for both software development and the management of the consequent project is becoming increasingly more relevant in many domains, and the defense domain is no exception. However, this relev...

The Agile paradigm, as intended in the 2001 “Agile Manifesto,” brought a disruptive software development methodology. However, with regard to mission- and security-critical organizations, traditional Agile methodologies are quite ineffective because they do not clearly address issues of (1) quality and (2) security. Within the Italian Army General...

The continuous evolution of the military “land operations ” generates instability of the Command & Control systems requirements obliging the developers to work with unstable and unconsolidated mission needs. In 2013, the Italian Army General Staff Logistic Department decided to overcome the problem of the “volatile requirement” transitioning to a c...

Agile methods are now a mainstream production process and their proponents are no longer considered hackers or cowboy coders. Still, in embedded and safety critical domains there is somehow the expectation that the approach be "more" plan-based; at least, many of the current normatives seem to lean toward such approach. A definite change in attitud...

Traditional defense acquisition frameworks are often too large, complex, and slow to acquire information technology (IT) capabilities effectively. Defense acquisition organizations for years have been concerned about the lengthy IT development timelines and given the pace of change in operations and technology, it is critical to look for new strate...

Capturing the “user requirement” has always been the most critical phase in systems engineering. The problem becomes even more complicated in software engineering where uncertainty of the functions to implement and volatility of the user needs are the rule. In the past, this initial difficulty of the software production phase was tackled by the req...

The application of the “Agile” methodology to a Military Application Software production line is not to be taken for granted. The adoption of the new production style has implied the solution of multiple problems and the generation of a custom version of the basic “Scrum” theory. One of the major changes has been imposed by the need to include Mili...

This book presents high-quality original contributions on new software engineering models, approaches, methods, and tools and their evaluation in the context of defence and security applications. In addition, important business and economic aspects are discussed, with a particular focus on cost/benefit analysis, new business models, organizational...

Many software-related technologies, including software development methodologies, quality models, etc. have been developed due to the huge software needs of the Department of Defense (DoD) of the United States. Therefore, it is not surprising that the DoD is promoting open source software and agile approaches into the development processes of the d...