CHAINSAW

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.

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