RES and Its Improvement Program

Raytheon Electronic Systems (previously Raytheon Equipment Division) builds real-time, mission-critical, embedded software systems under contract to defense and commercial customers. It builds these systems in the domains of air traffic control, vessel traffic management, digital communications, ground and shipboard radar, satellite communications, undersea warfare, military command and control, and combat training. The systems it builds are large and typically range from 70500 KDSI (thousand delivered source instructions).

Since 1988 RES has been engaged in a software improvement initiative which was driven by the need to overcome overrunning schedules and budgets, and the crisis-driven environment that resulted. Subsequently, once budgets and schedules came under some control, it turned its attention to the goal of reducing rework.

The RES improvement initiative covered roughly 350600 professionals. The investment for the initiative has been steady at about $1 million per year. The SEI CMM (Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model)-based approach was later adopted and used to help focus its improvements. Following this approach, it was self-assessed at CMM Level 1 in 1988, Level 2 in 1990, and Level 3 in 1992, and as of 1995 it operated all new projects starting at Level 4. (For a description of the SEI CMM levels, see Table 4.3 in the Software Quality Costs section of Chapter 4.)^[2] In 1995, RES won the coveted IEEE Computer Society's Software Process Achievement Award.

RES's improvement program strategy included a dual focus on product and process. The product focal point areas included system definition, requirements definition, inspections and integration, and qualification testing. The process focal point areas included development planning and management controls, training, and pathfinding.