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Tani Haque: Tani Haque is Vice President, INTERSOLV, St Albans, UK
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: [copyright] 1997 Faircount International. (Updated) Reprinted with permission.
Defence and aerospace manufacturers are now transforming themselves from pure hardware vendors into software centres for excellence. This transfiguration is occurring because these vendors have realised that software allows aircraft being built today to remain in the forefront of leading edge technologies tomorrow. This is the case because software can be constantly mutated to fit new configurations, customer requirements, dissimilar climates, and myriad other fluctuating conditions.
This transfiguration is the reflection of a new vision propelling the industry forward in the direction of smoothly managing - via repeatable and "improvable" processes - the profuse complexities of software development across multiple platforms.
As a result of this important shift in the defence and aerospace field, there has been a new emphasis on cutting edge, process-based software configuration management (SCM) technology, which allows the amalgamation of a multiplicity of software changes to achieve software superiority in the creation of vital mission critical defence and aerospace applications. As a result, this process-based SCM discipline has emerged as the wilful cash flow of software development endeavours within many enterprises.
This discipline defines software development processes, tailored to the specific needs of a particular project. It also automates the development lifecycle and ensures the repeatability of processes, even in the case of complex projects. Such capability provides valuable and timely insight into the status of each piece of a project, thereby enabling management to easily identify bottlenecks...