Portal helps integrate product development environment
Lockheed Martin Management & Data Systems (M&DS) has completed two phases of a six-year plan to integrate its software development environments.
M&DS is using portal technology from Mesa Systems International for its Integrated Program Environment initiative, the goal of which is to provide Web-based support for product development throughout the organization and the development life cycle.
The software, called MesaVista, enables M&DS project team members from multiple engineering disciplines to collaborate easily over the Web, while adhering automatically to regulatory requirements for software development quality ratings.
“The Integrated Program Environment will allow us to address customer requirements quickly and maintain the high quality of our software,” says Dr. Tom Duffy, director of M&DS Process and Technology. “We have already seen reductions in development cycle time, and we expect increased productivity as the software allows our engineers to collaborate and document process more easily.”
In the first two phases of the project, the portal technology was customized for M&DS team members according to their roles in the project and their specific engineering responsibilities. Mesa added features to manage the engineering process and integrated diverse M&DS software point applications so that the project team could access all data via the organization’s intranet. In the third phase of the project, now underway, new features will offer M&DS increased capacity to reuse successful engineering processes.
M&DS continuously tries to improve its product development process, and has attained Level 4 recognition from Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, which assesses the quality of software development processes using compliance to the Capability Maturity Model.
A unit of Lockheed Martin, M&DS is involved in systems integration and engineering, software development and program management. It has 7,500 employees in Arizona, California, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C.