According to the "Software Never Ends: Refactoring Procurement Code to Gain Competitive Advantage" published by the Innovation Committee of the US Department of Defense, a joint team evaluated the US Army F-22A Raptor project in mid-2017 and obtained a series of observations. And the recommendation, the overall assessment is: "The Air Force must speed up operations, take greater risks, and commit to completely change the management and technical implementation methods of F-22A work; competitors are accelerating their pace and accusing suppliers of poor performance is helpless. The F-22A Raptor maintains the dominant position of the air superiority platform."
The F-22A project office realized that the traditional DoDI5000 model was used in the F-22 acquisition process, which made the F-22 acquisition process slow and cumbersome. The initial modification will take at least 6 years to be delivered. The project office concluded the following bottlenecks:
●Requirements are static and strictly defined.
●The ability is delivered in a large monolithic version.
●Avoid changes and treat them as deviations from a well-protected baseline.
●The software development team pays too much attention to documentation.
● Separate projects and separate contracts lead to inefficiencies and conflicts of interest.
●The degree of automation of incremental testing is not enough, resulting in a long testing process.
More specifically, the team identified some common problems in the development of weapon equipment systems:
1) Development practice: The development process matches the traditional procurement process. Large feature sets, multiple baselines, manual development/testing tools, and lack of attention to software infrastructure upgrades have resulted in excessively long capability delivery cycles.
2) Planning: Some inefficiencies were found in the planning process, including the lack of indicators for workload estimation, the inability to determine priorities, and the inefficient use of developer time.
3) Organization: Organizational gaps include poor collaboration between teams, lack of incentives for engineering talents, and priority competition among multiple suppliers.
4) Contract: One of the most important observations is the failure to determine the order of priority.
In the overall recommendation, the team puts forward the requirement that the software development team adopt a modern agile software development process.
In November 2017, the F-22A project office took several measures to change outdated development practices. For example, the project office reorganized the TAClink 16 and TACMAN projects into a single agile development stream. The F-22A Raptor has taken a positive step in adopting more modern methods to acquire hardware and software. The improved project brief is shown in the figure below.
