Agile Engineering of Scalable Enterprise-Level Capabilities

Net-Centric Solutions, as enabled through distributed service-oriented architectures, will have a significant effect on the way organizations address the development and integration of scalable enterprise-level capabilities. In these cases, we have found that traditional systems engineering approaches take too long and are too costly in order to meet the mission critical demands of users. Current research suggests that agile development offers a model for embracing and promoting evolutionary change throughout the lifecycle of a project. In this paper, we discuss our efforts to scale agile development best practices to engineer, assess and acquire enterprise-level capabilities for very large Department of Defense systems. We discuss a multi-year case study to evaluate and mature capabilities in support of the Global War on Terror. It is based on rising a distributed innovation lab environment in conjunction with a series of warfighter workshops focused on themes and challenge problems identified by the user. The workshops are designed to provide hands-on warfighter immersion into emerging processes, concepts and capabilities combined with facilitated discussions to develop and/or refine CONOPS and Tactics, Techniques and Procedures. We highlight some of the capabilities provided, techniques used, challenges faced, lessons learned and how this approach impacted the user.