QUARTERBACKING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
MODERN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT Data, however important, is useless if we don’t take advan- tage of it. Now more than ever industry, academia and Soldiers themselves are solving critical problems leveraging data with modern software. But the Army isn’t fully modernized in how it approaches software development, deployment or mainte- nance. “Sure, gone are the days when the software development team would mail a CD-ROM to the operations team to deliver a new application, but we are far from having every application developed and deployed through a modernized pipeline,” said Chad Claussen, director of digital transformation technologies in DASA DES.
Migration to Agile software practices is important because of the pace of change experienced by our warfighters. Te legacy development methodology (i.e., waterfall) that we have lived in for decades takes too long to deliver and too frequently misses the target by the time the software is delivered. Major DOD programs average five to seven years from requirements to deliv- ery. But with modern software development practices, things are changing.
At the direction of the undersecretary of the Army and the vice chief of staff, DASA DES is co-leading one line of effort in the Network Capability Portfolio Review to focus on software
FROM WATERFALL TO AGILE DEVELOPMENT
The waterfall methodology has been around for a while and it is straightforward: Collect all the requirements up front, build the cascading schedule of sequential phases, and set it all in motion. Completion of one phase triggers the next until the full-featured product is developed and tested.
There are still some limited use cases for waterfall develop- ment, for instance when you are given all the requirements up front and aren’t allowed to communicate with the user, as is the case with some classified programs. Unfortu- nately for the Army, requirements change, Soldiers have new mission needs, and the enemy gets a vote. The old way of business, so to speak, has us way too far down the field before we can cut left or right in response to an adver- sary’s movement, or any change in user needs.
Agile methodology, in contrast, is built around the tenet that we may not be able to get all the information up front; the developers may need to be responsive to customer feed- back, technology changes or global threats. So instead of creating a plan for solving the whole complex problem up front, the problem is split into achievable tasks with imme- diate testing, delivery and feedback. Keeping the customer in the loop throughout the process helps ensure the prod- uct that gets delivered is what the user actually needs at that time.
There are a variety of Agile frameworks (e.g., Kanban, Extreme Programming, etc.), but the most popular is Scrum. Coined by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka in an arti- cle in Harvard Business Review in 1986, the moniker is sports analogy to stress teamwork in confronting complex
problems. In Scrum, the team works together in two- to four- week sprints to implement a new functionality and collect customer feedback for future cycles.
AGILE VS. DEVSECOPS DevSecOps (development + security + operations) is another modern software development practice that is largely complimentary to Agile. Whereas Agile is focused on frameworks for managing the development and deliv- ery of software (e.g., Scrum with guidelines like two- to four-week development sprints), DevSecOps is more of an internal philosophy focused on breaking down the barriers between the development team (the ones writing the code), the security team (the ones doing security) and the oper- ations team (the ones deploying and managing the code). Both DevSecOps and Agile offer improvement in efficiency but with different key focus areas.
One key feature commonly associated with DevSecOps is a continuous-integration, continuous-delivery pipeline (see “Heard It Through The Pipeline,” Page 42). In legacy development models, multiple engineers would produce code, then work at the end of the development process to integrate their features, test everything and pass the whole build to the operations team (which could then take anywhere from hours to weeks to deploy it). With a continuous-integration, continuous-delivery pipeline, as much of the process is as automated as possible. Features are continuously integrated and available to the rest of the team to reduce bugs. Security and testing are embedded in each step of the process, and incremental builds are continuously delivered as often as possible.
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Army AL&T Magazine Winter 2023
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