ASCC: The impact of a Silver Bullet

The AT&T Network Systems Silver Bullet Project, launched in August 1990, represents a major breakthrough in software engineering. It optimizes and accelerates the software development process by incrementally improving business, organizational, and technical processes used by the Operations Systems (OS) Business Unit. In July 1991 OS opened the Advanced Software Construction Center (ASCC) to define and implement an organizational and business model based on the Silver Bullet processes and to expose the model to the stresses of developing products for OS. Since then, the ASCC has developed more than 14 products, achieved International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001 certification, and reduced its average product interval from 25 to 15 weeks. It has also been evaluated as one of the top three software organizations in AT&T, based on software process assessments. All this was achieved while keeping its costs one-third lower than the rest of the business unit. The application of the Silver Bullet processes to the OneOS Change Program — an AT&T initiative to create an integrated set of OS assets that can be delivered as an integrated product offering — illustrates the applicability of these processes to larger, more complex systems and organizations. This paper traces the evolution of the ASCC, describes how it operates today, and provides current measures of the interval and quality of ASCC software development.