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2024 Year in Review

Lasting Impact: SEI Core Capabilities Help Launch the F-35

The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter has been one of the Defense Department’s most complex weapons system acquisitions. The SEI started advising the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) in 2018, the same year an early F-35 flew in combat for the first time. Since then, SEI researchers and engineers have provided the JPO their expertise in some of the institute’s core mission capabilities. The SEI’s impact on the F-35 program continued into 2024 as a new batch of modernized planes started rolling onto tarmacs.

In 2018, the F-35 JPO was facing challenges adapting its internal processes to meet production plans. The SEI’s first and perhaps most important task was to help the JPO and the program’s contractors implement Agile and DevSecOps practices at scale. The practices applied not just to software development but also to contracting and administrative workflows. “We don’t just work on software delivery, we help with the whole ecosystem around it,” said Will Hayes, the SEI’s Agile transformation team lead and technical lead for the engagement with the F-35 JPO.

Senior SEI technical staff were embedded with the JPO to speed tasking and real-time technical support for Lean and Agile systems engineering and software sustainment policy and practice. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the SEI helped sustain the program’s Agile transformation by creating the Agile Virtual Schoolhouse. Program staff and international partners used this repository of online, self-paced modules, which were informed by the JPO’s own experiences. The Schoolhouse was just one of many customized trainings the SEI delivered for the JPO and its contractors.

Software modernization was another early thrust of SEI work. Over the course of the F-35 program, software development in the Department of Defense had been transitioning from the waterfall style of system development to a faster, iterative style. In 2019, the SEI engaged with a JPO working group to produce a 10-year software modernization strategy and roadmap. It positioned the JPO and its contractors to focus on more efficient software capability delivery.

More recently, SEI researchers have participated in independent review teams (IRTs) to help break technical logjams. As part of the program’s Tech Refresh 3, which enables the F-35’s Block 4 capabilities, the SEI led an IRT on the aircraft’s software architecture on behalf of the Secretary of the Air Force. SEI experts on another IRT helped identify software issues that had idled about 100 runway-ready jets.

In each engagement with the F-35 JPO and its contractors, the SEI has built up the program’s own capabilities. In March 2024, six years after the SEI first met with the JPO, the Pentagon announced that the F-35 was approved for full-rate production. Later that year, planes started being delivered as they came off the assembly line.

The SEI’s placement at the intersection of government and industry enabled the institute to transition more than three decades of research and development in software engineering, Agile practices, and defense acquisition to this critical weapons acquisition.


Photos: U.S. Navy, Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Brian M. Brooks; U.S. Navy, Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Brian M. Wilbur; U.S. Air Force, Tech. Sgt. Alexander Cook

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Agile Virtual Schoolhouse

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