Dr. Michael Tanner • SAF/AQ
Our purpose is to field effective warfighting capabilities at the speed of relevance. We strive to create a capability factory with the following characteristics:
- Speed Tight cycle time enables user feedback; reduces integration risk
- Quality Capability matches user’s needs while minimizing delivered defects
- Focus Deliver small set of working capabilities vs. large set of partial capabilities
- Collaboration Synchronize efforts of government, prime, and suppliers
Optimizing the time to field new capabilities requires lean thinking to eliminate waste by visualizing the end-to-end value stream. After a feature is added to the backlog — be it a user request, response to an adversary tactics change, or a defect discovery — we measure our success via two metrics: speed and quality.
We must evolve to deliver capability at the speed of relevance. It is not enough to optimize our development processes. It is an illusion to optimize anything other than the process bottleneck. We must include quality from the first line of code. We must engage early and continuously with key quality stakeholders (security, safety, airworthiness, etc.) to develop a robust infrastructure, architecture, code, and concept of operations.
DevSecOps encompasses the culture and processes that enable rapid, continual delivery of cyber-resilient systems. Embedded weapon systems have additional demands that must also be integrated into the DevSecOps culture and processes. Elevating these on-par with Development, Security and Operations highlights the importance of incorporating quality into all aspects of a program. In an aircraft program, we must continually integrate security, safety, airworthiness, Seek Eagle, tech orders, training, and others at every stage of the life cycle.
The traditional wildcard character, “*”, enables teams to identify the elements most important to them and thus becomes Dev*Ops, or simply DevStar.
