Trade Study Solution to a Performance Problem
• Statement of the Problem
A large amount of legacy data had to be transformed into the newly designed Oracle databases, but analysis showed that a custom conversion approach would take too long and cost too much.• Approach to Correcting the Problem
An Aspiration Software Database Engineer conducted an extensive trade study to determine the best way to convert the legacy data into the new databases. He developed a stringent set of evaluation criteria for the selection process. Those criteria, and their validation processes, were meticulously vetted with GeoScout program engineers and NGA customers. As part of that process, weights were assigned to each criterion, including price.A preliminary evaluation resulted in down selecting to three competing Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) products. Each vendor then demonstrated its ETL product by attempting to solve a specific problem set (within a fixed amount of time) in a lab environment. As a result, an ETL tool was selected and purchased. As a result, we were able to successfully convert the data with less cost and schedule than was in the original baseline.
• Other Constraints
The criteria that were developed covered more than just technical criteria. Other constraints, such as costs (e.g., purchase costs, installation costs, maintenance costs and user labor costs) and schedule were also incorporated into the evaluation criteria.
A trade study or trade-off study is the activity of a multidisciplinary team to identify the most balanced technical solutions among a set of proposed viable solutions. These viable solutions are judged by their satisfaction of a series of measures or cost functions. These measures describe the desirable characteristics of a solution. They may be conflicting or even mutually exclusive. Trade studies are commonly used in the design of aerospace and automotive vehicles and the software selection process (Phillips et al. 2002) to find the configuration that best meets conflicting performance requirements.