Too Agile? - DevOps Software Development Challenges in a Military Environment

Agile and DevOps software development processes now represent proven, commonly accepted models in commercial industry. For DoD military environments however, empowering teams of software developers and end user operators to build, test and release solutions without direct oversight and management of leadership is a brand new experience. In 2017, a DoD software acquisitions revolution occurred when approval was granted to scrap the former ineffective, cost prohibitive process and initiate the agile DevOps model. After one year since its introduction, this paper may represent the very first look at how well this nontraditional process is working out in a military command and control (C2) environment. More specifically, the study attempts to answer concerns by an USAF air operations center (AOC) headquarters that the process may not be delivering value to end user operators