Bowles

Professor Bowles research and teaching interests encompass the -ilities: reliability, maintainability, performability, usability, testability, supportability, producibility, etc. These are, quite simply, the requirements for designing a product so that it will work and work correctly, not sometimes, but every time it is needed. Getting the requirements right is a crucial first step. Many of the techniques used to produce a reliable design are the result of lessons learned over a long history of experience with earlier products, but software is now a principal component of all but the simplest systems and it is rapidly changing how systems are designed, built, tested, and used: interactions between systems make security an issue and the proliferation of malware make the operating environment increasingly more hostile and risky; human/system interactions are becoming more complex; life-cycle cost analysis is necessary to evaluate design tradeoffs. Traditional models for specifying, designing, building, testing, and using systems must be expanded and new models must be developed to accomodate this new reality. Professor Bowles is co-director (with Professor Eastman) of an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates site in multidisciplinary computing.

Education

• Ph. D., Computer Science, Rutgers University (1982)
• M. S., Applied Mathematics, University of Michigan (1970)
• B.S., Engineering Science, University of Virginia (1969)

Selected Publications

• John B. Bowles, William Hanczaryk, "Threat Effects Analysis: Applying FMEA to Model Computer System Threats", Proceedings Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium 2008, January 2008, Las Vegas, NV, 6 pp.
• John B. Bowles, "A Capstone Software Engineering Project Class for the Modern Era: Emphasizing Requirements and Testing", Proceedings National Capstone Design Course Conference, June 13 – 15, 2007, Boulder, CO.
• John B. Bowles, "The Personification of Reliability, Safety, and Security", Proceedings Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium 2007, January 2007, Orlando, FL.
• John B. Bowles, Michael S. Ware, Matthew J. Peterson, and Caroline M. Eastman, "Integrating security into the design of software systems," The Journal of Reliability, Maintainability, and Supportability in Systems Engineering, Spring 2006, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 15-25.
• John B. Bowles and J. Gregory Dobbins, "Approximate Reliability and Availability Models for High Availability and Fault Tolerant Systems with Repair", Quality and Reliability International, vol. 20, Wiley Interscience, November 2004, pp. 679-697.
• J. B. Bowles and C. E. Peláez, "Application of Fuzzy Logic to Reliability Engineering," Proceedings of the IEEE (Special issue on fuzzy logic in engineering), March 1995, pp. 435-449.