Collaborative Software Development of Scalable DoD Computational Engineering

The Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) Program is charged with positively impacting the US Department of Defense (DoD) Acquisition Process via Computational Engineering for capability gaps identified by the CREATE Boards of Directors. These prioritized requirements have been characterized and are annually reconciled in terms of gaps associated with required analysis cycle-times, physical accuracy, and necessary analysis capabilities. Furthermore, the Office of the Secretary of Defense(OSD) Overarching Integrated Product Team (OIPT) has provided goals which drive the usage of CREATE software by DoD Acquisition Programs. In order to achieve these usage targets, the CREATE Program has established a governance model and thence a hosted set of services to enhance collaboration among the developer teams and the targeted Acquisition Program (AP) subject matter experts. The goals of these collaboration services are to: 1) scale and speed the feedback amongst the CREATE and AP teams, while 2) minimizing interruption to developer and user workflows. Towards these goals, the community services have been architected as discussion forums, issue tracking, and documentation. Such services are now common place in the enterprise and open-source software projects, and efficiently scale with the user community by enabling a searchable knowledge base. In addition, owing to the key capabilities of this DoD software, CREATE requires authenticated and authorized access for each member of the community. This paper summarizes the governance model and process by which the services were selected, the architecture implemented, and the challenges going forward.