U.S. Navy Enlists Northrop Grumman to Turn Speed-to-Fleet Vision into Reality

Northrop Grumman Corporation is using its Lean-Agile system and software development experience to help the U.S. Navy turn its combat system speed-to-fleet vision into reality.

The aim is that when new air, surface or subsurface threats are identified, the software factory’s Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline could send a compiled and tested combat system software patch to address that threat to every Navy surface ship operating at sea within 24 hours.

Northrop Grumman has system coordinator responsibilities for Unified Platform (UP) for U.S. Cyber Command, and is also performing on the U.S. Air Force’s five-year Software DevSecOps Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA). On UP, Northrop Grumman is creating and deploying cyber capabilities across the Department of Defense using the Air Force Platform One ecosystem.

Northrop Grumman’s UP work builds on the Cyber Mission Platform (CMP) program where Northrop Grumman reduced the CI/CD Pipeline from months to days and reduced average release installation from hours to minutes.

The company leverages its ‘Factory in a Box’ containerized software development environment approach, in this case to work coding and refactoring challenges in real-time, collaboratively with teammates from the defense and software industries.  

Ready to bring fresh ideas to the Navy Forge software factory later this year, Northrop Grumman also recognizes that Lean-Agile and DevSecOps are only two pieces of the equation. It is therefore leveraging its model-based systems engineering tools and techniques to help ensure the Navy has a framework for understanding the combat systems architecture it has today and a roadmap for the integrated combat system architecture of the future.