Professional History of David A. Wheeler

Here's some information on things I've done, divided by categories I've devised. I hope you find it interesting! The first two categories are Leadership and Communication. The next categories are:

• Project Evaluations
• Software Engineering Technologies (CASE, SEE, Inspections)
• Internet and WWW Technologies
• Programming

Leadership

• Led over 20 people in the Joint Composite Tracking Network (JCTN) Technical Special Studies subpanel to develop software standards and gateway backup/failover requirements for the proposed JCTN.
• Led five-person team to develop RDD-to-SADMT (RTS), a program that generated executable simulations of Ballistic Missile Defense systems from a Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool (RDD-100). This essentially turned a CASE tool into a visual programming language for a specialized type of distributed simulation.
• Led three-person team to evaluate a Software Engineering Environment (SEE) and a SEE evaluation method.
• Led two-person team to develop hypertext version of a system information architecture.
• Ran own consulting business.

Communication

• Co-authored Software Inspection: An Industry Best Practice through the IEEE Computer Society Press (ISBN 0-8186-7340-0, IEEE Catalog Number BP07340). You can order this book from the IEEE by emailing to cs.books@computer.org.
• Authored Ada 95: The Lovelace Tutorial.
• Co-Authored the GNOME User's Guide.
• Wrote numerous papers; see my list of publications.
• Presented an enormous number of briefings in a variety of settings.

Project Evaluations

• Evaluated the Linux operating system against the Common Criteria, including the development of a vulnerability analysis of it.
• Led development of the "Software Challenges" report, a report describing the challenges of software development in the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and how to overcome them. This report has been given to Gen. Davis, Gen. Lyles (as director of BMDO), and Dr. Hans Mark (head of DDR&E).
• Performed a number of Software Capability Evaluations (SCEs), comparing software development processes of organizations with the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI's) Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Most of these evaluations were part of a source selection.
• Evaluated large projects (including the BSY-2, JSTARS, PATRIOT, and THAAD) to determine their status in various ways and forums.
• Performed detailed software safety analysis of systems using software fault tree analysis (SFTA) and made recommendations based on these analyses.
• Participated in the development of a software project risk analysis method.
• Developed a specialized communication analysis approach and applied it to identify communications problems in a specific project.

Software Engineering Technologies

• Researched and wrote on software inspections, culminating in book published by the IEEE.
• Evaluated a large number of CASE tools, including ObjecTime, IDE's Software through Pictures, Cadre Teamwork, RDD-100, and DCDS. Some of these evaluations are included in two of my papers.
• Evaluated a number of SEEs and their technological bases.
• Evaluated a number of special areas on request from sponsors, including software safety, DCE, CORBA, the Global Command and Control System (GCCS), the Defense Information Infrastructure (DII) Common Operating Environment (COE), TCP/IP and JTIDS, information standards, lessons learned from prototyping, Ada, metrics, reuse, and POSIX.
• Have taught classes on Unix internals, CASE methodologies, and other technical areas.

Internet and WWW Technologies

• Webmaster and system manager of the NATO CCMS Environmental Clearinghouse System (ECHS).
• Led development of a hypertext version of the BMDO National Missile Defense (NMD) Information Architecture, showing how to apply hypertext and the World Wide Web to system development documents. This included documentation on a process for developing "tightly woven" information; see my paper on the subject (IDA Paper P-3166).
• Developed a large interactive hypertext document, Lovelace, a tutorial on the Ada programming language. Lovelace was developed using a self-developed tutorial generator and supports interactive quizzes, code compilation over the WWW, and Java applets (written in Ada).
• Conversant with Internet and WWW technologies, including HTML, HTTP, Java, CGI, and TCP/IP.

Programming

• Know a large number of computer programming languages, including: Java, Ada, C++, C, Pascal, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, Fortran, PL/I, BASIC (various versions), LISP, FORTH, sh, awk, and various assembly languages.
• Developed RTS and STS, programs that extracted information in CASE tools and then generated executable simulations of Ballistic Missile Defense systems.
• Developed ada2html, a program that generates a hyperlinked view of Ada source code. This program has been used to develop documentation by at least one commercial company (Intermetrics' documentation on the Ada interface to the Java library).
• Part of team that developed a relational database system, Corot.
• Developed on-line purchasing and customer database search systems.
• Maintained in C a commercial multi-player role playing game (Scepter of Goth) and various other multi-player systems.
• Developed a number of smaller programs, such as the WWW tutorial generator used in Lovelace and the various programs to create hypertext links in the BMDO NMD Information Architecture.
• Have also developed a compiler, sophisticated assembly-language debugger, inventory control system, and six arcade games in assembly language.

You can return to my home page.

You can also look at the list of my published papers.