Software Testing Problems Continue to Plague F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program

[unhappycamper]

http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/aerospace/aviation/software-testing-problems-continue-to-plague-f35-joint-strike-fighter-program



Software Testing Problems Continue to Plague F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program
By Robert N. Charette
Posted 27 Mar 2014 | 17:14 GMT

The U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) earlier this week released its fifth annual report on the state of the F-35 Lightning II, aka the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), aka the “most costly and ambitious” acquisition program ever. What the GAO found was foretold by a report earlier this year by the Department of Defense’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation. The upshot: the F-35 operational and support software development continues to be the major obstacle to the program's success.

In addition, the GAO report states that the projected cost of acquiring the planned 2443 F-35 aircraft (which comes in three flavors) threatens to consume some 20- to 25 percent of annual defense program acquisition funds for the next twenty years or so. The GAO doesn’t explicitly say so, but the operations and maintenance costs of the program—currently estimated to be between $800 billion and $1 trillion dollars or more over the next 50 years—will also consume a significant chunk of DoD’s annual weapon-system related O&M budget as well.

The GAO report states that, “Challenges in development and testing of mission systems software continued through 2013, due largely to delays in software delivery, limited capability in the software when delivered, and the need to fix problems and retest multiple software versions.”  Further, the GAO notes that the F-35 program continues to “encounter slower than expected progress in developing the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS),” which is the F-35’s advanced integrated maintenance and support system (pdf). In the latter case, Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the F-35 Program Executive Officer, conceded last month that the ALIS system was “way behind” where it should be and was “in catch-up mode.” This, the GAO indicates, was apparently at least partly because of a lack of testing facilities that remains a problem years after ALIS development began.

The GAO notes that as a result of the on-going software problems with the aircraft's mission and support systems, F-35 program officials and contractors alike believe that software development will continue to be the F-35 program’s “most significant risk area.”

[bemildred]

1. Software testing is expensive, and easy to fake. nt