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 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

• Published 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.
• To publish Ada 95: The Lovelace Tutorial.
• Published numerous papers; see my list of publications.
• Presented an enormous number of briefings in a variety of settings.

Project Evaluations

• 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, 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.