COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. \u2014 When Raytheon ran into trouble developing the U.S. Air Force’s next-generation GPS control stations, it turned to a tiny Pentagon office populated with technology geeks from Silicon Valley for software help.
First, Raytheon adopted DevOps, an up-and-coming style of software development that injected automation into the process, Sullivan said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“When a developer writes some new code and checks it into the system, builds are automatically kicked off, unit tests which have been written are automatically run, the results are automatically processed \u2026 and then all software developers can get access to the results at the same time,” he explained. The software tools running those tests are typically commercial off-the-shelf, but are customized by Raytheon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although DevOps is a commercial best practice, it hadn\u2019t filtered into a major Defense Department acquisition program until DDS suggested using it on OCX.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another new element for a military weapons program is the use of Amazon Web Services\u2019 cloud computing platform for integration and testing \u2014 although not deployment \u2014 of unclassified software elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“What that does for us it provides an ability to really just be a lot more nimble in terms of environment,” Sullivan said. “Instead of having to find space and having to go buy a bunch of servers and rack them up, the virtual nature of the cloud provides you the ability to very quickly stand up an environment and then tear it down when you\u2019re done and then start all over again.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That has enabled Raytheon to write and check code more quickly and freed the company from hardware constraints, he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
OCX is now progressing according to schedule. The company recently wrapped up the factory qualification of Block 0 \u2014 an early iteration runs the system\u2019s launch and checkout system \u2014 and is set to deliver it in September or October. The system has been deployed at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado, and currently is going through site acceptance testing, Sullivan said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The launch of the first GPS III satellite will occur in March 2018, but OCX won\u2019t become fully operational until 2020 when Block 1 comes online. Block 1 will add more cybersecurity functionality to the system, and Raytheon has finished coding six of seven Block 1 software iterations and integrated five of them, Sullivan said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The company continues to work with the Air Force Digital Service team, the service’s offshoot of DDS that spawned last year, he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“It\u2019s been kind of an evolution. It\u2019s impossible to learn everything in a day, so we continue to try to do the things necessary that we think will give us the value for the amount of investment that we put into it to succeed in the program,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Air Force acquisition leaders are interested in broadening\u00a0the Air Force Digital Service’s\u00a0work to other software-heavy weapons programs. Earlier this year, Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the service\u2019s top uniformed acquisition official, said he and his civilian counterpart, Darlene Costello, were making a list of potential programs that could benefit from the office\u2019s expertise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Raytheon ran into trouble developing the U.S. Air Force\u2019s next-generation GPS control stations, it turned to a tiny Pentagon office populated with technology geeks from Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":29444,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":102,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[29,23,102],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3384],"class_list":["post-16095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-show-dailies","category-space","category-space-symposium"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"N4RJ6U67ZJDCRHMMYTY3Q24UHA","arc_canonical_url":"\/digital-show-dailies\/space-symposium\/2017\/04\/06\/amazon-cloud-automation-help-resuscitate-ocx-program\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n