To Probe Further: Software Special Report

Who Killed the Virtual Case File?

For background on the FBI, read Ronald Kessler's The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (St. Martin's Press, 2002).

Track FBI CIO Zalmai Azmi's attempts to drag the bureau into the 21st century at http://www.fbi.gov/hq/ocio/ocio_home.htm.

Read the record testimony of Arnold Punaro, executive vice president and general manager of Science International Applications Corp."prepared for the 3 February 2005 U.S. Senate hearing on the Virtual Case File (VCF)" at http://www.saic.com/cover-archive/law/trilogy.html.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) warned Congress of serious problems with the VCF. Start exploring GAO documents at http://www.gao.gov. For the September 2003 report "FBI Needs an Enterprise Architecture to Guide Its Modernization Activities," search on report number GAO-03-959.

For OIG reports related to the FBI's IT systems, start digging at http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/FBI. One must-read: "The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Management of the Trilogy Information Technology Modernization Project" at http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/FBI/a0507/index.htm.

The graybeards evaluate the VCF in a National Research Council report at http://www7.nationalacademies.org/cstb/pub_fbi.html.

The Exterminators

For an introduction to formal software-design methods, see Jeannette M. Wing's "A Specifier's Introduction to Formal Methods," in Computer, September 1990, Vol. 23, no. 9. "An Invitation to Formal Methods," by Jonathan P. Bowen et al. in Computer, April 1996, Vol. 29, no. 4, discusses how to make formal methods more widely used.

For many examples of formal methods used in industry, see "Formal Methods: State of the Art and Future Directions" at http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~emc/papers/Invited%20Journal%20Articles/ state_art_future.pdf.

Praxis High Integrity Systems offers a number of technical articles and presentations at http://www.praxis-his.com/publications.

Why Software Fails

Many good books have been written about the causes of software failure, including Frederick P. Brooks Jr.'s The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition (Addison-Wesley, 1995); Kweku Ewusi-Mensah's Software Development Failures (MIT Press, 2003); Stephen Flowers's Software Failure: Management Failure (John Wiley and Sons, 1996); Robert L. Glass's Software Runaways (Prentice Hall PTR, 1998); Capers Jones's Patterns of Software Systems Failure and Success (International Thomson Computer Press, 1996); Peter Neumann's Computer Related Risks (Addison Wesley, 1995); Ivars Peterson's Fatal Defect (Vintage Books, 1996); Susan A. Sherer's Software Failure Risk (Plenum, 1992); and Edward Yourdon's Death March (Prentice Hall, 1997).

The online "Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems" is at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks.

Frederick P. Brooks Jr.'s classic paper "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering" appeared in Computer, April 1987, pp. 10-19.