An analysis of mission critical computer software in Naval aviation

Abstract

For over 25 years, the United States Navy has been designing, developing, and maintaining software for embedded computer systems. Throughout this generation of Naval aviation software development, no collective analysis of the successes and failures in software development has been accomplished. To accomplish this task, this thesis evaluated aircraft software from the Department of the Navy against two metrics: 1) did the original software development schedule have to be changed, and 2) did the original software released to the Fleet contain any major defects? This research has revealed that only about half of the original software development schedules were sustained without a milestone change being made. Also, software that was released to the fleet had no major deficiencies three out of four times. To further specify this information, it has been refined into categories of software language, size of program and type of software program. The results of this study will be beneficial to aviation program managers, software developers and software maintenance technicians.