The articles in this issue will help motivate readers to use EVM, explain how EVM can be used for software projects, and provide methods to use EVM. The first article, by Wayne Abba, one of the world’s best known experts in EVM, examines Government Policy for EVM, from its inception in the 1960s to the present. He comments on how government policy shifts affect the value of EVM as a management tool. The next two articles address use of EVM for software projects. The article by Hunt, Solomon, and Galorath shows how to specifically address EVM for software projects, including using Solomon’s widely-published Performance-Based Earned Value methods. The article by John Rusk, a software architect from New Zealand, shows how EVM can be applied to agile software development efforts. In the next article, David Bachman, the EVM curriculum director for Defense Acquisition University (DAU), explains how EVM artifacts and estimates are used in DAU’s 12-Step Integrated Program Management Model for decision making, action planning and addressing program risks. This article includes a reference to an example for using the model on an actual program.
In addition to these EVM theme based articles, DACS presents an article (by multiple authors) that describes the
SPRUCE initiative. SPRUCE, which stands for Systems and Software Producibility Collaboration and Experimentation Environment, is funded by the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) and is technically guided by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Rome, NY. It is an open web portal to bring together DoD software developers, users, and software engineering researchers virtually by enabling their collaboration on specifying and solving software producibility challenge problems from real-world scenarios.
