Brendan O'Connor
Agile Software Development Processes for Aerospace Systems

Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

Much of the commercial software world has embraced agile development processes because they offer benefits in productivity and resilience to changing requirements. Aerospace software projects, especially flight software projects have been slower to embrace agile because of the need to support waterfall program milestones and maintain bidirectional traceability of requirements. Aerospace software applications also have stringent performance and availability requirements that necessitate more formal process steps. Emergent Space Technologies has attempted to bridge the gap between agile and more formal flight software practices by employing a form of the agile Scrum process in the development of flight software. Emergent has been developing the Cluster Flight Application (CFA), a distributed, service-based flight software application for DARPA's System F6 using its Scrum based, but CMMI Level 3 certified processes. This presentation will summarize the method and highlight some of the steps made to both streamline the flight software development process and maintain the verifiability of the end product.

Brendan O'Connor is the Chief Systems Architect for Emergent Space Technologies. He has many years of experience developing mission critical software systems in distributed environments including satellite systems and other systems crucial to western society like those that keep casinos running and provide senior citizens a place to put their quarters. He specializes in leading software teams that successfully deliver working software in trying circumstances using agile, customer-centric methods. Mr. O'Connor has led many successful projects to deliver mission critical software and systems solutions. Prior to joining Emergent, Mr. O'Connor was a software architect and Senior Principal Engineer at The Boeing Company and the Chief Technology Officer for a publicly traded company that produced high-availability, high volume transaction processing software for the casino industry. He has a BA in Chemistry from New College of Florida and an MA in Chemistry and an MSE in Aerospace Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. In his spare time he is an avid runner, bicyclist and pilot.
IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Jacqueline Le Moigne

interpreter upon request: 301-286-7040