Federal contracting rules also limit the profit that can be made selling to the government (you can argue this are not effective).
Some 'agile fans' have been promoted up a few notches at Lockheed, that is all this is.
The USG likes to pay for and own source code and weapon system designs.
Maybe. I definitely do not have first hand knowledge of anything.
What I do remember is that a few months ago SpaceX's Starlink was playing cat-and-mouse games with Russian jamming attempts. They had an issue where the Russians couldn't jam an already established connection, but because of some protocol weakness they could jam the establishment of new connections. Within a very short amount of time they patched it and rolled out a fix both to their satellites and the receivers which negated that particular jamming attack.
When that happened Dave Tremper director of electronic warfare for the Office of the Secretary of Defense commented that they envy that level of agility. He said that current way how the Pentagon responds to such challenges would have taken much much longer.
Not saying that this recent news is directly related to that event, but observations like that can prompt the defense sector to offer solutions like this.
more details on that particular case: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2022/04/20/spacex-shut-down-...
They're mechanisms for transferring tax money to gigantic employers that employ people across zillions of different congressional districts. It's a doublespeak to avoid having millions of people on a program that would otherwise be termed "socialism" or "welfare".
SpaceX/Starlink, on the other hand, are more interested in shipping and servicing customers and getting revenue thereby than being approved by a constituency and/or the existing military-industrial complex.
The DoD and SpaceX were built for drastically different purposes, and it's no surprise that they have drastically different change control procedures.
There’s obviously a ton of pork and SLS in particular is a known welfare program, but that’s not a fair critique of F-35 nor of the defense sector writ large.
Fortunately we don't have to be very good to be better than our peers.
Honestly I feel like the F35 is a target in the “information warfare” space. While the project is not above criticism, China/Russia/etc have every reason to promote animosity towards the project.
space-X hopefully did a risk review. what is the chance this "100 line fix" is going to break something else? what was the in lab coverage? can it be rolled back?
sometimes you say you want agility; but you would really prefer low risk of greater failure.
Surprisingly, the contractors retain copyrights and trademarks somehow. For example, apparently you need a license to put an f-22 or an f-35 in a game (or movie etc?), I think those things necessarily belong to the taxpayers. Weird licensing.
As for licensing to put the f-22/f-35 in a game/movie, I wonder how much of that is actually needed from a legal perspective, and how much is "lets just do it anyway".
The name is covered by trademark so you need a license to call it "F-35 Lightning", but I don't think the design or shape of an aircraft is covered by copyright or trademark law, so it should be fine if you just avoid the name.
[1] https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2016/9/8/in...
There is a separate regime that covers useful articles: design patents, which have a much shorter term. The design patents can AFAIK cover things like toys, I don’t know about game assets. You might have to look at the actual grant of patent rights to see what is claimed. I don’t get the impression that the big aircraft manufacturers care about games for plane nerds.
> Agile is a buzzword of software development, and so all DoD software development projects are, almost by default, now declared to be “agile.”
Who doesn’t love Big Agile?
And they are really picky about finishing. All stories are tied to a charge code.
Moreover, since they're "agile," they no longer have any kind of dedicated testing teams, so developers are responsible for creating and maintaining all of the test suites. But they're evaluated on velocity, not reliability, and velocity is defined as story points delivered, which is measured by tickets closed, but since labor hours are purchased in fixed buckets, the definition of done becomes "we ran out of hours," so in practice, developers just don't write real tests, everything always passes, and nothing actually works.
More moreover, even though the government has pushed all of its contractors to adapt some kind of "DevOps" branding that implies you have broken down the traditional barriers between development and ops, in practice, development and ops are entirely separate contracts run by separate companies and purchased by separate directorates of your sponsoring agency, so in reality, as a development contractor, your work is purchased and approved by an acquisition office that doesn't actually own the operational environment and you're not even legally allowed to directly communicate with whoever actually does own and run that environment. All communication has to go through the acquisition office. So you end up delivering exactly what was asked for, but it doesn't get accepted because the organization that gets to accept or reject changes to production isn't the same organization that was involved with all of your planning and development activities.
I understand why she still works there. She's spent her entire career working on special access and compartmentalized projects, and I worked at this same place on similar geoint projects even before she did. In spite of what Hacker News would have you believe about the quality of military technology, you really do get to see amazing shit, including satellite capabilities I worked on a decade ago that the likes of Starlink and Google are still not close to matching, but I couldn't do it any more and left years ago.
what a pointless burden
They work with blocks of sprints, defined as 8-12 weeks, "increments".
12 weeks, that's a quarter. Yeah, that's quarterly planning for you. Only this time it's certified Agile (tm).
It's all very serious, and pointing this out is not always as appreciated as it should be.
I thought everyone was “doing//going agile” like 10-15 years ago already.
Of course government agencies I expect to be last to be agile but there are still companies I find are claiming to start “agile transformation”.
Maybe should not be surprised as much because I also worked on digitalization projects for some big companies that were still pen and paper in 2020…