The RBSE Program

The Repository Based Software Engineering (RBSE) program is a research and development program whose mission is to provide state-of-the-art technology transfer mechanisms to improve NASA's software capability.

The purpose of RBSE is to support the adoption of software reuse through repository-based software engineering in targeted sectors of industry, government, and academia. The program provides a repository that: facilitates the selection, acquisition, integration, and reuse of software components; provides proven architectures upon which to assemble systems; and promotes common software engineering practices and standards.

The RBSE program operates the ELSA repository as its public interface. RBSE is sponsored by the NASA Technology Utilization Division and is administered by NASA Johnson Space Center and the Research Institute for Computing and Information Systems (RICIS), a part of the University of Houston - Clear Lake.

RBSE also collaborates with Rockwell Space Operations on the Reusable Objects Software Environment (ROSE) project. Quoting them:

The Reusable Objects Software Environment (ROSE) is being developed at NASA's Johnson Space Center to provide an economical and effective approach to reengineering and maintaining Flight Design and Dynamics (FDD) systems. The software that supports FDD operations is the result of an evolutionary process that began with the planning of the mission of a reusable orbiter and has continued to this day. While the software was developed under a variety of methodologies and languages, it has a couple of similar characteristics; it is difficult to use and expensive to maintain. The Flight Design and Analysis System (FADS) development was originally targeted to address the software in addition to upgrading the hardware platform. For a variety of reasons most of the software was rehosted to the new platform with minimal change. Therefore, the problems associated with operations and maintenance of the software persist.
The ROSE project is intended to bring the existing FDD software in to a consistent architecture and design framework. To accomplish this, the existing functionality is being reengineered into a modern architecture and design based on Object Oriented Software Engineering (OOSE) techniques and implemented in a language that supports those techniques., and accomplished through a repeatable defined process. The information associated with the architecture, design and process is stored in a repository that is available to and maintained by sustaining engineering.

RBSE Staff

Project Director: E. T. Dickerson

Chief Scientist: Charles McKay

Director of Research and Development: Dave Eichmann

Other RBSE Faculty

Additional RBSE Information

Try here for an extended description of the project.
Try here for an experimental prototype of a Mosaic-based version of MORE, our new repository architecture.
An overview of MORE was presented at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web in May.
A characterization of MORE as a reengineering project will be presented as a poster at the Second International Conference on the World Wide Web in October.
Try here for the project motto. Apologies to Greg Bowen of CSC from whom we ripped off, err... 'reused' this image.
Try bibsearch for a HTML-formatted search mechanism into a WAIS database of bibliographic citations of computer science and software engineering literature. Another good source of reference material is the NASA RECON WAIS index.
Try urlsearch for a search mechanism into a WAIS database of World Wide Web HTML documents found by our experimental spider.
An overview of the spider was presented at the First International Conference on the World Wide Web in May 1994.
Our take on web ethics for agents was presented at the Second International Conference on the World Wide Web in October 1994.

Other Software Engineering Information Accessible on the Web

Software Engineering page of the WWW Virtual library

RBSE Partners

Software Technology Branch

JSC Home Page

MountainNet Inc