SPRUCE: A web portal for the collaborative engineering of Software Intensive Systems Producibility challenge problems and solutions

Lack of widely available, well defined, DoD specific, software producibility challenge problems that drive engineering research has been a significant factor contributing to the problems with developing large, software-intensive systems for the DoD within schedule and budget. Our experience indicates that well articulated and bounded problems can spark scientific and engineering innovation in software producibility and help to bridge the gap between technology users and technology providers. This paper describes the Systems and Software Producibility Collaboration and Experimentation Environment (SPRUCE), which is an open web portal to bring together DoD software developers, users, and software engineering researchers by collaborating on specifying and solving software producibility challenge problems. We describe SPRUCE´s concept of operations designed to capture challenge problems and to motivate a community to pursue solutions. We describe SPRUCE´s key features, including self-organizing communities of interest (CoI), dynamically evolving challenge problems with accompanying artifacts, and built-in experimentation facilities to reproduce the problems and evaluate solution benchmarks. Finally, we demonstrate early experiences and results with representative CoIs and challenge problems.