Agile Approach to Managing Defense Systems Requirements

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Software Intensive Defense Systems: An Agile Approach to Electronic Warfare Development

Accelerating Mission Readiness in Software Intensive Electronic Warfare Programs

Defense systems programs are large, complex, and highly regulated. In electronic warfare and other software-intensive environments, requirements evolve rapidly while compliance and mission assurance remain non-negotiable.

Yet many teams still manage requirements, design decisions, and change requests across disconnected documents, spreadsheets, and siloed repositories, increasing program risk through stakeholder misalignment, costly rework, uncontrolled scope changes, and limited traceability across the system lifecycle.

In this webinar, Cary Bryczek, Solutions Architecture Director, A&D at Jama Software, explores the real-world challenges of managing requirements in software intensive defense systems and shares how an agile, structured approach can improve speed, alignment, and program confidence.

You’ll learn to:

Why document- and spreadsheet-based approaches break down on complex defense programs
How limited requirements visibility increases risk across electronic warfare development
Practical strategies for managing change while maintaining cross-functional alignment
Techniques to maintain end-to-end traceability from mission requirements through validation and deployment
What modern defense teams require to support compliance, speed to mission, and deployment readiness
Explore how Jama Connect^® enables structured collaboration and AI-assisted workflows for agile defense development

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BELOW IS AN ABBREVIATED SECTION OF THIS TRANSCRIPT

Cary Bryczek: Let’s talk about our agenda for today’s webinar. Today, we’re going to talk about the call for more agility. We’ll look at an instrumented agile approach. We’ll go into depth on our AI-enabled engineering. We’ll look at measuring engineering as well. We’ll have a bit of a product demo and, of course, some Q&A. The US Department of War recognizes that acquisition programs still need to modernize to transform and meet rapid changes in today’s landscape, and agility is a really important theme in that. The department is going to be modernizing systems engineering across all acquisition pathways to enable agile development and technology insertion. They want improved technology and manufacturing risk management. They need to reduce the need for testing. They need to reduce the amount of rework and retesting to certify a system. This transformation is really critical, given the rapid modernization of technology and the increased use of software acquisition, advanced computing, AI, and model-based acquisition.

These tools, properly applied, inherently reduce requirements and design defects, and test in build-up and scope required when verifying, validating, and certifying end items. This particular strategy is echoed in numerous places. The CIA is radically shifting to a culture of speed, agility, and innovation. The Defense Acquisition University points out that requirements churn is still a fundamental problem that requires innovative approaches for more rapid delivery of capabilities to the warfighter. Interoperability is central to what they’re trying to achieve. Lawmakers are requiring the Army to outline how new systems will integrate with the existing programs of record. Cyber practices are still front and center. Acquisition and requirements, AI, all need to be realigned towards rapid incremental delivery of this operationalization of minimal mission capability.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

Bryczek: So there are some success levers. These are the three big ones. Improved agility, interoperability, and the modernization of systems engineering. Agility doesn’t just mean having a DevSecOps process if you’re doing software development, but it also needs to bridge systems engineering itself and bring that interoperability to the forefront. I call out MOSA because it’s really an integrated business and technical strategy. MOSA implies the use of this modular design, including system interfaces designed according to accepted standards. And those types of conformances can be verified.

So it’s no mystery that document and spreadsheet-based approaches fall short on complex defense projects. And even when using some modeling tools in a siloed fashion, teams still experience manual efforts to cross-reference traceability and perform change impact. Poor requirements’ visibility leads to misalignment, rework, and scope creep. Defense systems projects are large, they’re complex, and they may involve many design standards in the mix. Yet many teams are still managing requirements design and program change decisions using disconnected documents, spreadsheets, and siloed tool repositories. This result is a misalignment between stakeholders. It promotes costly rework, scope creep, and, really, the limited traceability from early mission requirements through design, development, and deployment is a hindrance.

So what we really need to do is to bring that value stream closer to software development. Inside the software development process, the agility to plan, to process those user stories, to execute deployment in a secure manner, it’s there. But outside of that fast-moving DevSecOps process, where the warfighter’s mission needs the capabilities and the constraints, the CONOPS, those are often changing, and they’re often changing in a fast and unexpected way. The hardware that the software is deployed on may change, or whole new capabilities might need to be fielded. Agility needs to happen outside of the DevSecOps process. And the good news is, is that Jama Connect is a really good tool to make that happen.

RELATED: Enabling Multi-Phase Reviews Across the Aerospace and Defense Systems Lifecycle

Bryczek: So we’ve all heard about shifting left. It’s not just about performing testing earlier. To the left, we need to combine that DevSecOps process with the rest of the value chain. Tools like Jira and Azure DevOps are great for linking work items, code changes, builds, and releases. But complexity, especially in the context of embedded systems and complex software, system-of-systems, requires broader traceability with change and impact analysis that crosses outside of the DevSecOps boundaries; we have to think about that. Change is really complex. And Jama Connect really is the only platform that can truly solve for shifting to the left. Our software enables faster validation of the warfighter needs. We enable the warfighter to collaborate earlier via those feedback loops embedded directly in our software using our review center, rather than via email or document markups.

Our software can provide requirements to the software teams that represent the contextualized needs of the warfighter that are shifting as their needs morph. Jama Connect’s Live Traceability™ provides the agility that the program management teams need to assist in decision-making and to help the software teams adapt to those changing needs. Now, our software helps hardware and software teams stay aligned when following standards such as MOSA or FACE, and CMOSS. Jama Connect’s responsible AI for requirements and tests really radically increases the speed of development, speeding up the time to develop and link test cases to requirements. It’s a core aspect of building a high-quality product and speeding the delivery of warfighting capabilities. Being able to simply click a button and be presented with 10 relevant test cases with the steps is a huge leap forward and results in significant time savings. It’s already providing valuable time to our own Jama Software internal engineering teams. I’m really excited for our clients to start adapting this, and I can’t wait to show that to you in our demo.

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Software Intensive Defense Systems: An Agile Approach to Electronic Warfare Development

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Cary Bryczek

Cary is the Director of Solutions Architecture for Aerospace and Defense with a focus on the specialized business and technical needs unique to this market. She helps lead the company in Systems Engineering and Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) domain. She has over 25 years of experience leading Systems Engineering in the A&D industry with roles at the US Government, Lockheed Martin, PTC, and Jama Software. She is a member of the International Counsel on Systems Engineering and member of the Women in Aerospace organization. Outside of work she enjoys playing jazz guitar and gardening around her farm which sometimes requires the operation of tractors and UAVs.

[Webinar Recap] Software Intensive Defense Systems: An Agile Approach to Electronic Warfare Development