WICKED: DIGITAL INTERFACE CONTROL DOCUMENTS

Abstract

Digital interfaces are often defined in text-based documents such as PDF, necessitating time intensive and error-prone human-in-the-loop transcription for each implementation of the interface. The lack of standardized language between interface control documents (ICDs) inhibits common tooling and multi-system analysis for DoD Large Force Test Events (LFTEs), and the unstructured text definitions are prone to logical, structural, and typographic errors. The 309th Software Engineering Group (SWEG) has developed a human- and machine-readable digital ICD standard which enables unified tools for translation, data management, and analysis of dissimilar digital systems. The format is defined with a descriptive, enforceable, and extensible schema, which guarantees well-formed ICDs, while allowing bespoke application-specific behav iors. Adjacent SWEG-developed tools for parsing PDF formats have extracted over 40 digital ICDs for various DoD systems, generating over 1 million lines of code.