Navigating People Concerns when Transitioning from Sustainment to Engineering Software-Reliant Systems

1. Learn and apply relevant patterns and idioms.
2. Create a defined context for your coding effort.
3. Learn and apply modern quality assurance practices and tools.

Engineering large, complex systems and systems-of-systems cannot be done in isolation. Engineers must create interfaces among software components and subsystems and set expectations for how the systems may behave when interacting. Groups of strong individual contributors accustomed to working problems alone may not easily transition to this collaborative setting.

Team-building exercises can be viewed as soft by some organizations. However, their value has been proved through research showing that people are more likely to share an idea and accept feedback from someone with whom they regularly engage on topics not directly related to work.

COVID-19 has created social distancing protocols that mandate remote work for many employees. The extra effort needed to stay connected to team members is more widely understood. Savvy managers will have remote members at the top of their checklists when making decisions that affect their teams, demonstrating that priority to the entire team in everyday actions.

Virtual brown bag lunch situations and happy hours have enabled connections and team building, and have generally positive effects on well-being.

• The array of contributors that feed into a large software effort create a number of potential concerns. 
• Software delivered from contributors will be of varying quality, style, and structure. 
• The integration into a larger system creates the potential for complex issues. 
• Engineering organizations that feed into the DoD do not always deliver systems that include comprehensive architecture and design considerations.

Solution: Accept that large systems may require extra people power to integrate, test, and maintain. Over time, some engineers develop a deep, organic understanding of a system.

In organizations where professional-development opportunities are limited, team members’ working problems alone will not develop and enhance their skills and may not advance their careers.

One solution is to Incentivize teams through alignment with industry pay practices. Organizations can create rewards for teams and individuals who improve product iteration latency through the use of reuse, COTS, open-source, and open standards.

It is important to know more about these issues because an increasing amount of empirical evidence points us in this direction. Also, we believe that there is a need to change what is made available to the practitioners today in terms of software engineering knowledge, and make them realize the importance of these issues and incorporate them into everyday project development and management practices.