The U.S. Air Force learned to code—and saved the Pentagon millions

In partnership with Pivotal Labs, a pilot program is out to remake how the Pentagon acquires weapons systems.

Standard DoD procedure requires systems like the AOC software to be competitively bid, and for the winning contractor to design, build, certify, and test the entire system before delivering it to users—and then to go through the entire process again each time any appreciable amount of code needed to be changed. That’s in part why the Air Operations Center software had been in use more or less unchanged since the 1990s...

Ash Carter...To get Pivotal on the job fast, Oti leveraged a few contracting instruments that are normally eschewed by risk-averse Pentagon bureaucrats. With Pivotal on board, four of the Air Force coders were paired with four Pivots, as dictated by the company’s adherence to a software development methodology known as Extreme Programming...JIGSAW cost a grand total of $2.2 million, according to Shah. The new software is not only saving time—planning now takes a matter of two to three hours, rather than all day—but is also more reliable: AFCENT now scrambles two to three fewer tankers each day—at a cost of about $250,000 each. That means the project paid for itself in under a week...

The notable thing about the decision to start working on low-level code—and about all of the team’s decisions—is that it was made on the fly, based on real-time conversations about users’ needs. That’s nothing more than best practices for modern software development, but at the DoD, such agility would normally be impossible. Specifications commonly take years to write and then more years to deliver on before code can even be tested in the field—often making systems obsolete by the time they’re delivered. “The DoD violates pretty much every rule in modern product development,” Schmidt told U.S. Congress recently.