Tag Archive for: aerospace

Ease of Use and Quick Deployment

magniX chooses Jama Connect for its ease of use, quick deployment, and to help modernize their requirements management program and demonstrate compliance with standards.

Headquartered in Everett, Washington – located just outside of Seattle – magniX is the leading developer of propulsion systems for electric aircraft, including motors, inverters, and motor controllers.

magniX is working to bring affordable, emission-free, and quieter flights to communities around the world.

More about magniX:

  • Founded in 2009
  • Expertise: Leading developer of propulsion systems for electric
  • aircraft, including motors, inverters, and motor controllers
  • Recent Awards for magniX:
    • 2020 Fast Company Most Innovative Company in Energy
    • Finalist 2020 GeekWire Innovation of the Year award
    • Frost and Sullivan Technology Innovation Leadership Award

With big plans on the horizon, magniX set out to find a modern requirements management solution that could help them make their ideas a reality.

Initially, the team was using Microsoft Excel and Word to manage their requirements, but they quickly realized it was only a temporary solution. The limitations and risks of using static requirements in this manual process were becoming apparent.

As they began their search for a requirements management solution, they knew the following things were most important:

    • Moving to a modern, cloud-based RM tool
    • Creating a centralized requirements repository
    • Demonstrating compliance with aviation standards

RELATED POST: Five Key Design Control Practices that Improve Compliance and Help Develop Better Products

While the evaluation process was short and led to the selection of Jama Connect®, the magniX team seriously evaluated multiple systems.

Jama Connect stood out for the following reasons:

  • Jama Connect was a more modern, easy-to-use solution with the powerful features they required
  • Jama Connect allowed for the magniX team to easily customize the solution to meet their needs, without requiring complex custom scripts to be written
  • The interface in Jama Connect was intuitive

“The ability to easily customize Jama Connect to fit our needs without custom scripts is a major advantage over other solutions,” said Carlos Souza, Head of Energy Storage Systems at magniX. “Jama Connect just allows us to achieve more with less work.”

Ease of use and quick deployment

In addition to ease of use and quick deployment, ultimately, the magniX team selected Jama Connect because the solution:

  • Allows for end-to-end traceability that gives the magniX team the ability to control requirements from the product level down to implementation in one single database
  • Is powerful, intuitive, and easy-to-use requiring very little training to see wide adoption and ROI
  • Enables configuration control throughout all stages of development

“One of the main reasons we selected Jama Connect is the ability to provide configuration control for all the requirements and maintain them in one database. It allows everyone in the company to have visibility into the requirements and their status,” said Souza.

Jama Connect helps to form a digital thread through development, test, and risk activities — enabling the magniX team to have end-to-end compliance, risk mitigation, and overall process improvement. Moving from static requirements (in disparate teams, activities, and tools) to Living Requirements™ management was the key to them achieving real-time, cross-team collaboration and coordination. And, because of its easy, intuitive, modern user interface, broad adoption is made simple.

RELATED POST: Requirements Management – Living NOT Static

Jama Connect is very intuitive and easy to get up and running. We received training, and the rest was very fluid and straight forward,” said Souza. “Teaching others how to use the tool internally is very easy.”

 

To learn more about magniX’s outcome and future with Jama Connect, read the full story here.

 


eVTOL certification
Toys to Tools – Keeping Pace with eVTOL Certification Standards

Today’s market for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) is one of the most innovative and fast-moving in the aerospace industry, so keeping pace with ever-changing eVTOL certification standards is no easy endeavor.

eVTOL Applications

The military led the way in eVTOL by transforming drones designed as toys, into tools used on the battlefield. But the most recognized use case spanning military and commercial application is in passenger transport. Air taxis and helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) is also an area where dozens of companies are currently competing and taking a wide variety of technology approaches.

eVTOL developers are also looking at new ways to provide services to communities. The use of eVTOL aircraft in the utility sector requires relatively low operational complexity and reduces operational costs while bringing the benefits of lower noise levels, zero emissions, and more safety. Nearly any application that is being serviced by a helicopter today is wide open to eVTOL. There are endless applications for utility drones that can offer commercial services in the community, such as land survey, cargo delivery, agricultural seeding, lifting heavy loads, search and rescue, in addition to government use applications such as firefighting, law enforcement, and military operations.

RELATED: Increasing Efficiency in Testing and Confidence in Safety Standard Compliance

eVTOL Certification Challenges

Whether the aircraft is being developed for piloted passenger transport or an unmanned utility application, there are common non-technology challenges that impact both. These challenges include public acceptance, operational challenges, and some in marketing and distribution. One challenging speed bump are the regulatory hurdles. Presently, there are no unified certification standards.
Today a given eVTOL company would need a new certification for each country it operates in. Companies in EMEA are actively working with European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) working group to help define generally accepted safety levels. In the US the FAA continues to expand certification requirements to cover innovation in aircraft design. Today’s eVTOL aircraft cross boundaries and are difficult to categorize. Is the aircraft a rotorcraft that would follow FAA Part 27 or is the aircraft a fixed-wing and follow 23?

RELATED: Getting Past Legacy Software Pains in Requirments Management

Managing Changing eVTOL Certification Requirements

As eVTOL certification requirements expand and evolve, this volatility can be an advantage for Jama Software customers. Jama Connect’s application architecture provides capabilities to easily manage complex requirements and V&V data in a manner that makes it more streamlined to provide the necessary development process evidence.

As designs evolve and change or morph into new aircraft variants for expanding community service needs, Jama Connect’s change impact and variant reuse technology make it easy to identify where there are gaps or necessary re-design required. Documenting process adherence becomes automated and the generation of reports for EASA or the FAA takes just the click of a button. Complex supply chain communication and data exchange (long the turf of outdated tools or manual documents), is replaced by easy-to-use, web-based mechanisms that can plug into the digital engineering ecosystems used by innovative organizations.

Jama Connect, being first and foremost a requirements management tool, is built with what we call our secret sauce – live traceability. Live traceability creates a digital thread by connecting requirements, to architectures, to tests, and aircraft functions throughout the eVTOL design and development lifecycle. It is real-time query-able and maintains a full audit trail of all changes which can be easily reported on for demonstration of process evidence purposes. With Jama Connect, eVOTL engineers and also supply chain stakeholders can reap the benefits of the digital thread with built-in collaboration and robust data exchange.

Likewise, the risks of using spreadsheets — like user error and fatigue — for eVTOL certification are eliminated, and efficiency increases as teams can focus on their central duties. Live traceability also fosters team collaboration and enables earliest detection of possible production risks.

We’ve curated a few additional resources that you might find helpful- take a look!


ARP4761A

Safety does not rely upon magic numbers but rather real answers. Likewise, safety is never an accident, but true safety should prevent accidents. The numbers “4754” and “4761” are not magic but are associated with safety. Safety and the numbers have evolved – the new answers for safety are found in 4754A and 4761A; specifically, SAE’s ARP4754A and ARP4761A.

ARP4761A Guidelines

ARP4761A is rather more than a guideline for aircraft safety. ARP4761A (formally issued in 2018) is officially titled “Guidelines and Methods for Conducting the Safety Assessment Process on Civil Airborne Systems and Equipment.”

In fact, ARP4761 is almost a tutorial on generalized safety and how to apply various theoretical analysis to assess ongoing development activities toward aircraft safety. Clearly, ARP4761A is tightly coupled with ARP4754A and lays the foundation for the most fundamental aspect of aircraft regulations: safety. Clearly, viewing the avionics development ecosystem, ARP4761A’s prominent place in the upper left conveys its importance:

RELATED POST: Aerospace Compliance: When Failure is Not An Option 

The Safety Assessment Process

The safety assessment process is a vital aspect of aviation safety, and for avionics, ARP4761 provides the foundation.

Literally every aspect of aviation undergoes safety assessment to better understand potential risks, quantify them, and then prevent, detect, or mitigate them. Experienced aviation persons are truthful when stating the safety assessment process is perhaps the most important element of avionics development.

For avionics, the role of the safety assessment is to ensure the safety of the aircraft, its crew, and the occupants. Essentially, aircraft safety is optimized by performing careful analysis, architectural optimization, criticality level determination, component selection, architectural improvement, monitoring, and maintenance. Therefore, only by having a thorough safety assessment process can we ensure we have an architecture with additional safety-related requirements which address safety aspects.

The title of ARP4761 accurately justifies its importance within this fundamental process: “Guidelines and Methods for Conducting the Safety Assessment Process on Civil Airborne Systems & Equipment.”

To learn more about this important airborne systems safety standard, please download our full whitepaper here.


Aerospace ComplianceEnsuring Aerospace Compliance to Regulatory Requirements 

We are in a time of unyielding technological development. It is not unlike the “giant leaps” made by the US Space program in the 1960s. The technology available to us in our everyday lives and certainly in the Aerospace and Defense industry is staggering.  

Think about when you got your first cell phone. Remember those famous Motorola flip phones?

That was only 20 years ago. As I write this, I’m listening to digital music on my Galaxy Note through Bluetooth headphones typing on a touchscreen laptop that weighs like two lbs. Conversely, the Apollo program had less computing power than my 1993 vintage engineering calculator and the space shuttle had 1MB RAM while my Galaxy Note has 128GB plus the SD card. And this is close to obsolete, at all of two years old. We take things for granted: Alexa, smart cars, 4G data. But the technological development behind them is non-stop.  

I should introduce myself. My name is David Ewing. I recently joined Jama Software as Principal Solution Architect for A&D. My background is in Enterprise PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) both on the industry and the software supplier side. Most recently at Aras I spent time as a Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, and Technical Account Manager for A&D.  

Aerospace Compliance Can Require a Significant Effort

Developing new technology and innovative products in a heavily regulated industry like aerospace entails a significant amount of effort spent ensuring that requirements are understood and verified. Requirements from the customer typically relate to features, performance, cost, etc. As an example, let’s use airline seats – because we can all relate to them. When an airline orders seats for their shiny new fleet of aircraft they are specifying things like weight, in–flight entertainment, cushions & covers, and recline geometry. They are interested in the environment for the passenger, the cost per mile, etc. They are absolutely concerned about safety. However, the base safety requirements come from the regulatory body – FAA or EASA (European Union Safety Agency).     

A crash test dummy before its accelerated down the track. Photo by Christine Negroni

Conversely, the FAA is concerned with airworthiness and compliance to a boatload of regulatory requirements. Things like the spacing from the cabin walls is specified as is the aisle width to support egress and passage of the elbow biting beverage cart (that’s why your seats are narrow!). The FAA does not care about the fancy TV monitor, they care what happens when your head hits it during a tarmac accident. They don’t care about the luxurious leather and fabric designs; they care about the flame spread and amount of toxic smoke that they release should something bad happen. Every piece of nonmetallic material in an aircraft seat is tested for flammability and toxicity. Most importantly, the FAA cares about crash worthiness should something unexpected happen. All aircraft seats are put through a number of simulated crash tests to make sure those seats stay attached to the airframe, the food trays stay stowed, and you can get to the floatation devices. This is also the fun part – Engineers love to break things!  

Keeping track of all this information is no small task. The number of Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), Advisory Circulars (AC), Technical Standard Orders (TSO) is a mountain of information in its own right. And we are not even talking about a flight critical system like the avionics.  Furthermore, we haven’t even added the customer requirements yet. 

Managing Requirements for Certification

Existing aerospace firms have entire certification departments to support the regulatory requirements and program managers to handle the customer side of things. The amount of Non-Value Added (NVA) work that is applied to managing requirements and certification is staggering. Engineers that are hired to help to perform the actual certification testing spend a significant amount of their time acting as a librarian.  

If managing requirements and validation is so hard, how is a new startup supposed to deliver innovative new products? Or how can the existing aerospace firm reduce NVA work to speed time to market and reduce costs? With a solution created for the airborne systems developer, that’s how! Enter Jama Connect for Airborne Systems.  

Jama for Aerospace Compliance

We have created an industry focused solution for airborne system developer. It is the hot fudge sundae with sprinkles and cherry on top to legacy tools vanilla requirements management. Jama Connect for Airborne Solution is pre-configured with item types, pick lists, relationships, project & import/export templates. All these features are directly aligned with regulatory guidelines like ARP4754 and DO178.  

Developing Hardware and Software in Sync

We know airborne systems require extremely rigorous integrated development assurance processes. System architecture, hardware, and software must be developed together, in concert, and then validated against the certification requirements. To demonstrate compliance with airworthiness requirements, certification agencies accept the use of the noted industry guidelines. By embedding them into the Jama Connect for Airborne Systems solution we operationalize the processes and free you from the overhead of creating and managing the digital infrastructure – so you can focus on innovation.   

Your hire talented engineers to develop innovative new products – not be a librarian for documents and standards. With Jama Connect for Airborne systems we free your team to innovate – we will take care of the record keeping! 

If you are interested to learn more about the Jama Connect for Airborne Systems Solution, I’ll be hosting a webinar tomorrow, April 14. We will give an overview of the solution and a demonstration.  Additionally, we have information you can read at your leisure on our website. Or if you want to chat, reach out to me directly – dewing@jamasoftware.com. I am always happy to talk shop!  

To learn more about how Jama Connect for Airborne Systems helps teams to improve their ability to communicate, track, and test requirements for teams in the aerospace industry, download our solution overview. 

 DOWNLOAD NOW

Editors Note: 2020 was a year we’ll never forget. But amidst a sea of setbacks, companies across the globe continue to rise to the challenge and push forward with innovative product development. Teams who have the right tools and processes in place especially across distributed teams are able to improve collaboration and speed the time it takes to deliver new, innovative products.

In our spotlight series, we highlight companies who are doing extraordinary things in the product development space, and showcase the ways that their innovations are changing the world as we know it. In this post, we applaud Boeing for their work in providing augmented power supply to enhance the International Space Station’s health and enable more research.

This post originally appeared on Boeing’s website on January 11, 2021, and can be found here. 

Boeing will support the International Space Station’s (ISS) growing research capabilities and commercial opportunities with new solar arrays to increase the orbiting laboratory’s power supply. The modification to Boeing’s ISS sustainment contract with NASA calls for Boeing to deliver six additional solar arrays to NASA for installation beginning in 2021.

The new 63-foot-by-20-foot (19-meter-by-6-meter) arrays will together produce more than 120 kilowatts of electricity from the sun’s energy, enough to power more than 40 average U.S. homes. Combined with the eight original, larger arrays, this advanced hardware will provide a 20 to 30 percent increase in power, helping to maximize the station’s capabilities for years to come. The arrays will provide ISS with electricity to sustain its systems and equipment, plus augment the electricity available to continue a wide variety of public and private experiments and research in the station’s unique microgravity environment.

RELATED: Learn More About the Jama Connect for Airborne Systems – Getting Started Edition

“When it comes to game-changing research and technological development, the space station is currently hitting its full stride,” said John Mulholland, ISS vice president and program manager for Boeing. “These arrays, along with other recent upgrades to the station’s power system and data-transfer speed, will ensure that ISS remains an incubator and business model in the commercial space ecosystem for the coming decades. Access to this unique lab will continue to pay off as researchers study the challenges of future deep-space exploration and make discoveries that improve life on Earth.”

Most of the ISS systems, including its communications systems, batteries and scientific equipment racks, have been upgraded since humans began a continuous presence on the orbiting laboratory in November 2000. Two International Docking Adapters, manufactured by Boeing, have been attached to the ISS to allow commercial spacecraft to dock autonomously to the station. Boeing is the prime contractor for ISS sustainment; the company’s studies have determined that the ISS could safely operate beyond 2030 if NASA and its international partners choose to do so.

Deployable Space Systems of Santa Barbara, California, will produce the structure of the new arrays, including the canister and frame that will unfurl to hold the solar-array blankets in place. Deployable Space Systems also built the canister, frame and solar array blanket for a prototype of the new arrays that was successfully tested aboard the ISS in June 2017.

Spectrolab, a Boeing company based in Sylmar, California, produces the arrays’ XTJ Prime solar cells, which will be some of the most powerful ever launched into space. They are the same solar cells that power Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft in flight and while docked to the ISS. Spectrolab also produced the station’s original solar cells, as well as the solar cells tested on the prototype.

“The XTJ Prime space solar cells are much more efficient than any of their predecessors and are fit to support the cutting-edge research being done aboard the International Space Station,” said Tony Mueller, president of Spectrolab.

Stay tuned as we continue to highlight these innovative companies. In the meantime, see how Jama Connect helps realign remote teams for remote work with minimal disruption.

SEE THE INFOGRAPHIC

Airborne Systems

Airborne Product and Systems Development

2020 has been a year that’s been described as “unprecedented” and “unparalleled” – as well as other descriptors probably best left out of our blog. As we close out this year, it’s hard to say what awaits us in the new one. One thing that we can be sure of is that innovation in medicine, science, and technology shows no sign of slowing down.

As we enter a new year of technological advancements, Jama Software asked select thought leaders – both internal and external – across various industries for the trends and events they foresee unfolding over the next year and beyond.

In Part II of our four-part series, we ask Cary Bryczek, Director of Solutions Architecture at Jama Software, to weigh in on trends she sees in the airborne systems industry (known to some as aerospace and defense) for 2021.

Note: Now that our 2021 Predictions Series is complete, you can also go back and read, Part I, Part III, and Part IV

What product, systems, and software development trends are you expecting to take shape in 2021? 
Cary Bryczek:

Urban air mobility and air taxis will not increase as companies are halting their development due to sagging market for personal transportation. Instead we are seeing an uptick in electric propulsion engines since the market continues to expand for unmanned systems in cargo shipping, agricultural application, and all-electric aircraft interest. Rolls Royce, Eviation, and even NASA are leading the way.

In terms of product and systems development, what do you think will remain the same over the next decade? What will change? 
Cary Bryczek:

Products will continue to include more and more software in the next decade but software and hardware development tools will still remain loosely federated from each other.

How do you foresee regulations shifting in the aerospace and defense industry over the next decade?  
Cary Bryczek:

Contracts on the defense and space side will be morphing to allow for more Agile/iterative styles of both contract response as well as design and development of systems. Contractors will be considered more closely to be a partner than the stereotype of a contractor. Contractors who are prepared with tooling that supports a more integrated digital ecosystem and collaborative environment will be better equipped for success.

RELATED: Jama Connect in the Digital Engineering Ecosystem

Any major disruptions to the aerospace and defense industry you’re anticipating in 2021? 
Cary Bryczek:

COVID-19 will continue to wreak havoc across this segment. Companies that are developing systems that are attractive to the commercial consumer will be finding new avenues to support their business.

What sorts of process adjustments do you think development teams will need to make to be successful in 2021? 
Cary Bryczek:

Teams will need to commit to broader cyber security processes and development controls to prevent exposure of both personal data and intellectual property. As more workers are working from home, the risk exposure is significantly greater. There will be more permissions controls around requirements data, verification results, and design data. The processes used to produce the design data whether that is generated by an DevSecOps process or hardware waterfall design will have added layers of process review.

What do you think will be some of the differentiators between a company surviving to see 2030, and those that do not? 
Cary Bryczek:

Companies will need to be able to retain engineering talent and be able to future proof the products and systems they design; those that do will be more likely to succeed. These companies will be offering more professional education and access to the latest tools and technologies as an incentive to retain the talent. Companies that bring in talent from adjacent market segments will be the big winners.

Where do you see Jama Software fitting in as the product development landscape evolves, and what can our customers expect as 2021 approaches? 
Cary Bryczek:

Work is now almost being performed by a 100% remote workforce in the commercial world. The defense and space world will feel the pressure from workers to utilize tools in the workplace that are now a commodity at home. As companies continue their journey to create digital ecosystems, Jama Connect will become connected with more tools in that ecosystem.

Stay tuned in the coming weeks for additional 2021 predictions! In the meantime, to see more information specific to the airborne systems industry, we’ve compiled a handy list of valuable resources for you!

SEE MORE RESOURCES

 

Today we are excited to announce the availability of Jama Connect for Airborne Systems, a solution designed to help systems engineering teams reduce barriers to the compliance process for their aircraft and aviation systems development process.  

Jama Connect for Airborne Systems lets customers seamlessly manage requirements, risks, and tests in one powerful platform while supporting mission and safety-critical standards.  The solution is built with the digital engineering ecosystem in mind, empowering engineering teams to better manage requirements, while simplifying regulatory alignment for civil aircraft system development, including ARP4754/ED-79.  

RELATED: Learn More About the Jama Connect for Airborne Systems – Getting Started Edition

The aerospace and aviation industry is experiencing innovative changes not seen for decades, where rapidly evolving technology has driven companies to develop disruptive products. The first commercial greater than 50-seat hybrid-electric aircraft is expected to make a fare-paying flight by 20321 and the FAA estimates over 545,000 commercial drones to be in use by 2021.2 Innovation brings increased complexity in the design process, including the connected networks that handle autonomous flight systems and unmanned, autonomous aircraft. The industry currently relies heavily on paper documents to track requirements— which simply can’t be depended upon in a digitized world with predominantly autonomous aircraft.   

The Chosen Solution for Leading Aircraft Companies

As the chosen requirements management platform for five of the leading global electric aircraft companies driving innovation, Jama Software recognizes and answers these challenges. The company has worked closely with its partners to provide an all-in-one solution to address and overcome these challenges with ease. Jama Connect for Airborne Systems helps engineering teams get set up quickly, allowing them to focus on product design and innovation, while reducing the costs and effort required to align their development processes to meet mission and safety-critical standards. 

“Aerospace systems engineering teams have a tough job: they are tasked with developing innovative, mission-critical systems at an accelerated pace and with unwavering quality standards,” said Keith Johnson, Chief Solution Officer at Jama Software. “Our new solution, designed specifically for these teams, will help facilitate the development process from start to finish. Jama Connect allows developers to hit the ground running with a purpose-built, out-of-the-box framework and best–practices guides that save critical time in the engineering process.” 

Key features of Jama Connect for Airborne Systems

  • Frameworks aligned with key industry standards and regulations: ARP4754/ED-79, DO-178C/ED-12C, and DO-254/ED-80 and SEBoK 
  • Best practices, including procedure and configuration guides for aircraft and aviation systems development 
  • Export templates and reports, including requirements specifications  
  • Supply chain collaboration to enable an ongoing exchange of requirements between customers and suppliers 
  • Training and documentation aligned to aircraft and aviation systems regulations, which provides accelerated onboarding to set systems engineers up quickly 
To learn more about how Jama Connect for Airborne Systems helps teams to improve their ability to communicate, track, and test requirements for teams in the aerospace industry, download our solution overview. 
 DOWNLOAD NOW

 

 

 

Image courtesy SpaceX

In the book Start With Why, author Simon Sinek recounts the story of Samuel Pierpont Langley — former secretary of the Smithsonian, professor of mathematics, friend of Andrew Carnegie and Alexander Graham Bell, recipient of a $50,000 grant from the War Department and the man destined to invent the “world’s first heavier-than-air flying machine.” At the time, Langley was the establishment and it was his invention for the taking.

But “Langley” isn’t the name we remember when we think about the American pioneers of aviation. Instead, we remember the two brothers from Dayton, Ohio. The ones with no investment backers or government grants, only the financial support of their own bicycle shop — the Wright brothers.

Over the last 20 years, a similar story started again. In an attempt to land a miniature greenhouse on Mars, Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with rocket engineer, Tom Mueller. Two years later, Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic with funding from a small collection of private equity backers. Today, there are more than 1,300 aerospace startups.

While most of the establishment sought government contracts, these startups gambled on private investment — and now it’s paying off.

How High?

As Celeste Ford, CEO of Stellar Solutions, an aerospace consulting firm, told SpaceNews.com “Legacy space was all government funded. The government said ‘jump’ and the industry said, ‘how high’… Now we have other sources of money in space that didn’t exist before.”

And you should see how high they’re jumping now.

“Feels like 1998, that was the last time we had the same level of enthusiasm with [aerospace] startups,” Randy Kendall, VP of launch program operations at The Aerospace Corporation told SpaceNews.

Just how enthusiastic? New York City based VC firm, Space Angels recently published their Q1 2018 Space Investment Quarterly report stating, and there has been a total of $14.8 billion of private equity investments in aerospace startups since 2009, with roughly $10 billion coming between 2015 and 2017 alone. Don’t count out 2018 too, it’s on pace to match or exceed 2017’s record-setting $4 billion. For comparison with another hot-topic industry, Crunchbase data says IoT startups raised $3.5 billion between 2015 and 2017 — that’s a difference of $6.5 billion!

Still not convinced something worth watching is happening?

With similar investments for startups between seed through series D rounds for the first quarter of 2018, the same Space Angels quarterly report says that the combined General Technology ventures have an accumulative series D valuation of roughly $150 million — that spans IoT, blockchains, semiconductors, software, etc. Space Ventures… $400 million. That is over 2.5 times the valuation with roughly the same investment!

Sure, maybe we need to pump the brakes a little. After all, we’ve seen similar energy before in the late 1990s and that didn’t pan out. As Kendall told SpaceNews, “The question I get a lot is, ‘What’s different today?’” For him, the answer is obvious: technology.

A Site to Behold

We’re seeing it everywhere:

Musk launched his Tesla roadster into Mars orbit (shown above) with his Falcon Heavy rocket, successfully landing the reusable automated thrusters back on Earth as if the video was played in reverse. The team at Boom Supersonic is trying to fly across the Atlantic in three and a half hours. Branson’s Virgin Orbit is attempting to fly commercial passengers into space from a runway. And Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch has developed the world’s largest aircraft by utilizing six Boeing 747 engines.

What these aerospace ventures are building isn’t the only thing catching people’s eyes. They’re moving faster, leveraging modern technologies and unburdened by legacy tools and processes. According to SpaceNews, a Pentagon advisory panel, the Defense Science Board, recently issued a report stating, “Software has become one of the most important components… and it continues to grow in importance.”

However, traditional government contractors haven’t kept up with modern development tactics. According to the report, “SpaceX appears to be an ‘existence proof’ that modern DevOps commercial practices can be used effectively for [developing] rapidly changing systems that are mission critical.” These aerospace startups are changing the industry and they’re doing it in completely new ways.

The Wright Way

The question then becomes, Langley or Wright?

According to Start With Why, “After Orville and Wilbur took flight, Langley quit. He got out of the business. He could have said, ‘That’s amazing, now I’m going to improve upon their technology.’ But he didn’t.”

So, do we learn from these startups and leverage their technology and ways of working, or do we ignore them and risk missing out?

According to SpaceNews, the Pentagon sure thinks the DoD can learn a lesson or two.

Do you?

During a December panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, moderator Trish Regan of Fox News asks, “Who do you consider to be the biggest threat in terms of having the most cutting-edge technology for their military right now?”

Simple question, right?

However, instead of providing a predictable answer as to who, Raj Shah, the Managing Director of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), takes the question as an opportunity to speak directly to a problem in the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Aerospace and Defense industries.

“Candidly, ourselves,” Shah says, “We don’t have an innovation problem in the Department… But what we do have is an incentives problem. We have built a set of structures and rules that does not encourage speed. You have processes where you won’t get fired for going slow, but you will get fired for making a small mistake.”

Before Regan can finish her follow-up question, Richard Spencer, Secretary of the U.S. Navy, jumps in: “I can’t stress that enough. Over the past 15 years or so, [we] have drifted away from risk management to risk amelioration, we’re trying to get risk out of the equation.”

The emphasis here is that you can, fundamentally, eliminate risk. Secretary Spencer says it himself: “I can get you to zero risk, [but] I can’t afford it.”

Importance of Speed and Efficiency

The balance in this equation is between risk, cost and speed, in achieving the desired outcome. In the current state of both the Department of Defense and Defense Industry, risk mitigation outweighs both speed and cost to the extent that every possible measure is taken to avoid the smallest of risks, no matter the cost or time commitment.

For both Spencer and Shah, this represents a threat… the biggest to the United States in fact! Secretary Spencer argues, “We have to get back to the game of managing risk… we have to be able to quantify the risk, manage the risk, in order to get the best effectiveness and efficiency out of what we’re doing.” While products and programs have grown in complexity and sophistication, development processes have in large part, remained static — leaving us in the current state-of-affairs where costs are high, efficiency is low and risk mitigation dominates.

Rebalancing the Equation

One key to risk mitigation is properly managed requirements. For this process, many companies and agencies have been relying on Word and Excel documents or an old document-centric tool called DOORS.

Keeping with these tools, the only means to manage risk faster is to either A) throw money at it (i.e., more people) or B) accept a greater risk possibility (no thank you).

However, in moving away from documents or document-centric tools, you can unlock the third option: C) change the processes by which you manage risk to achieve the same level of risk mitigation, but do so more efficiently.

As an example, in leveraging Jama’s modern requirements and test management solution for AS91000 — an aerospace quality standard requiring complete traceability — Mercury Systems was able to achieve end-to-end traceability far more efficiently.

According to Mercury’s Director of Systems Engineering, Joe Plunkett, he’s surprised more aren’t taking advantage. “We’re working with a defense contractor on a multibillion-dollar project,” Plunkett says. “He was stunned that something that took him hours to do could be accomplished in a few seconds with Jama.”

The Stakes Are High, But Not Binding

There is no denying the importance of risk mitigation in the Defense industry. While change is often seen as a risk in and of itself, that does not mean technological advancements cannot, and have not, improved risk mitigation. It is no longer necessary to sacrifice speed for safety and the Department itself is calling upon us to make a change.

As Kelly Johnson of Lockheed’s Skunk Works famously said, “We are defined not by the technologies we create, but the process in which we create them.”

Are you?

do-254-feat

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk…In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

– Mark Zuckerberg, CEO & Founder of Facebook

Although this is true of many of today’s greatest product innovations and the people behind them, when it comes to aerospace and avionics systems and product development, winning is rarely about taking a huge risk and having it pay-off. In fact, most of the time winning is about building a safe, reliable, working product. (Extra credit is given for products that come in on time, under budget, and exceed your customers’ expectations for usability and durability). Of course, to Mr. Zuckerberg’s well-established point, innovation typically demands some level of risk. The secret lies in taking on only an acceptable amount of risk relative to your design assurance levels.

At Jama Software, we know for certain that the more efficient the requirements management process and the more you can define and approve (reach consensus) requirements upfront, the higher your likelihood of coming in ahead of schedule and under budget – and mitigating those risks. In his new “DO-254 Costs Versus Benefits” whitepaper, Vance Hilderman points out the more assumptions that are minimized, the greater the consistency of requirements and their testability is assured, and iterations and rework due to faulty and missing requirements is greatly reduced. One of the leading causes of project failure is poor requirements management. The benefit of DO-254 is the rigor it adds to your requirements management process, thereby increasing your odds of success.

DO-254 can also help save you time by reducing the number of bugs found during testing. Vance states: “Since DO-254 mandates thorough and testable requirements along with design / implementation reviews, far fewer bugs will occur and the test / fix cycle should be expedited.” Voila! Not only will you have a better functioning product, but you will save time and money as a result of the process.

In our ongoing work with heavily regulated industries like Medical Device / Life Sciences, Aerospace, and Automotive, we often hear companies immediately associating cost with regulation. And although that is true, the benefits far outweigh the cost. One is that the most significant cost escalation across DO-254 DALs occurs between Level C and Level B – the cost for Level B is the same as for Level A. It is important to realize that the most expensive design iteration will be when you initially begin designing towards a standard. As you become more familiar with the regulations and rules, it will become easier, and you will also begin to be able to reuse requirements that are reviewed and approved to fit the standard. In complex, regulated environments an investment in DO-254 is not only strategic, but can maximize time to value and save from costly rework and technical debt.

To read Vance’s whitepaper where he goes in-depth on these ideas and concepts, please download the paper here.

And to learn more about how Jama can help you adhere to and provide traceable proof of adherence to these standards, please start a free 30 day trial today!