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Producing Flight Software with Agile Commercial and Government Practices
The practice of software development has struggled between "lean"
commercial (Agile development) and "heavy-weight" (such as military
standards) approaches. Both sides point fingers at the other, but
software can be developed that uses the best of each world. Lockheed
Martin Atlas flight software constitutes one of the major new upgrade
elements of the recently successful Atlas V maiden flight (August of
2002). Up to 80 percent of the Atlas V hardware systems had heritage
flight use. However, flight software underwent a significant
engineering and development effort from historic Atlas and Titan
products. While the code was new, flight software did take advantage of
many historic lessons learned, design elements, tools, people, and
Agile, and Traditional processes to successfully bring on-line the new
system. This presentation will review those things that allowed the
Atlas flight software to be successful, continuing the Atlas history of
first flight successes with a product delivery within six months of the
original schedule after over five years of hardware and software
development. Topics of the experience based presentation will include:
out of box thinking; Agile vs. Traditional Development Processes; use of
tools; metrics and software reliability engineering; testing concepts;
lesson learned including customer involvement; automated code
generation; experiences with OO; and plans for future improvement.
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