Agile Product Line Architecture

In this presentation, we discuss the challenges we have encountered in being agile in our airborne ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) product line architecture, which includes millions of lines of code and over 100 kinds of hardware components. A product line enables reuse benefits, but inhibits green field innovation. However, we must be agile and innovative, and we discuss how we accomplish this goal.

We employ a modified Agile development practice for both software and hardware development and use technology roadmaps to plan for improvements and upgrades that create new business opportunities by extending the product line's capabilities. Through architecture changes, we have significantly reduced our products' costs, time to market, size, and weight while significantly increasing the performance, capabilities, and range of offerings of our products. In the presentation, we will discuss how we achieved these agilities and improvements.

This presentation was given at SATURN 2011 in Burlingame, CA.