Taking Agile to New Heights: Scaling for Success in Aerospace

For developers in aerospace, the allure of innovation is undeniable. Imagine building the next generation of fighter jets or commercial airliners and pushing the boundaries of flight, all while ensuring pilot and passenger safety. Many of us also know the allure of agile development—rapid iteration, empowered teams, and a laser focus on customer needs.
But how could you combine this with the aviation industry, traditionally known for its rigid, waterfall-esque development cycles and emphasis on strict regulations? With some key adaptations, agile holds immense potential to revolutionize how aircraft take flight and operate.


The High Cost of Waterfall

The traditional waterfall approach in aerospace, while ensuring safety and compliance, often leads to extended development cycles and cost overruns. There are several aspects of the waterfall method that can make it detrimental to modern aerospace and aviation organizations:

• Limited Early Feedback: Waterfall relegates user feedback to later stages, hindering opportunities for course correction and potentially leading to a final product that doesn't meet user needs.
• Lengthy Development Cycles: Imagine pouring years of effort into a complex military fighter jet project, only to discover a critical design flaw late in the game. This can lead to costly rework, missed deadlines, and compromised safety if these issues aren’t caught and addressed early enough.
• Stifled Innovation: The rigid structure of waterfall can also make it difficult to adapt to changing requirements or incorporate new technologies as they emerge.

The Benefits of Scaling Agile

Agile's iterative approach, emphasizing early feedback loops and continuous delivery of working prototypes, can help identify and resolve these issues much sooner. By breaking down development into smaller, more manageable sprints, teams can get a functional version of a component, subsystem, or even an entire application up and running quickly. This allows for early user feedback (from pilots, engineers, end-users, or other stakeholders) and facilitates course correction before significant resources are sunk into potentially flawed designs. This also comes with:

• Enhanced Collaboration: Scaled Agile fosters a culture of collaboration between engineers, designers, and other stakeholders. The cross-functional approach breaks down silos and helps everyone work towards a common goal.
• Adaptability in a Fast-Paced Industry: The ever-evolving nature of aerospace technology demands adaptability. Scaled Agile's iterative process allows teams to easily incorporate new technologies and adapt to changing requirements as the project progresses.

Agility vs. Strict Regulations

As we’ve all seen in recent headlines, the aerospace and aviation industry needs to prioritize safety above all else. Thankfully, this doesn’t have to be a compromise—agile methodologies are ideally positioned to incorporate stringent regulations like those from the FAA:

• Focus on "Agile Compliance": Instead of viewing compliance as a separate hurdle at the end of the development cycle, agile methodologies can integrate compliance requirements into the process itself. This can be achieved by breaking down compliance requirements into smaller user stories that can be integrated into sprints. Each user story focuses on delivering a specific functionality that adheres to relevant regulations. This establishes continuous compliance checks throughout development without sacrificing the agility and rapid iteration that agile is known for.
• Embrace Traceability: Maintaining meticulous traceability throughout the development process is a critical piece of regulatory compliance. Each line of code, design decision, and change needs to be documented and linked back to specific requirements. Agile methodologies can leverage this with agile tools specifically designed for traceability management. These allow developers to track changes, link user stories to specific requirements, and generate reports that demonstrate compliance throughout the development lifecycle.

Scaling Agile Success in the Aviation Industry

Scaled Agile across large, geographically dispersed teams, with this industry’s complex hierarchies and established ways of working, requires careful consideration—but it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Some actionable ways to improve the adoption and success rates include:

• Invest in Training: Education is paramount—don't expect engineers, project managers, and executives accustomed to decades of waterfall projects to seamlessly transition to agile methods and mindsets overnight. Invest in comprehensive training programs that educate all stakeholders on the principles and benefits of Scaled Agile in aerospace development. This training should not only cover the "how" of agile practices but also address the "why"—showing agile’s value in helping them achieve their goals faster, more efficiently, and with a higher degree of innovation.
• Embrace Decentralized Decision-Making: One of the central pillars of agile is empowering cross-functional teams to make decisions within a predefined framework. This fosters a sense of ownership and accountability among team members, leading to faster problem-solving and quicker decision-making. In large aviation organizations, this might involve empowering remote or dispersed teams to make decisions within the boundaries set by project goals and compliance requirements.
• Leverage Scaled Agile Frameworks: SAFe has a variety of configurations (Essential SAFe, Large Solution SAFe, etc.) that can be tailored to the specific needs of an organization. Each has guidance on team structure, artifact management, and key ceremonies like sprint planning and backlog refinement. By leveraging a proven framework like SAFe, developers can avoid reinventing the wheel and focus on what matters most—building the next generation of aircraft.

The Future of Flight & Scaled Agile

Scaled Agile isn't a silver bullet, but it's a powerful tool with the potential to transform how aircraft are designed, developed, and delivered. This is especially important at the inflection point we find ourselves, leaving manned aircraft behind for remotely-operated (or AI-operated) drones. We can become active participants in shaping the trajectory of flight, ensuring a future where cutting-edge aerospace technologies take to the skies (and beyond) faster, more efficiently, and with the same unwavering commitment to safety.
Remember, Scaled Agile isn't about abandoning structure — it's about harnessing the power of flexibility within a safety-conscious framework. Let's work together to write the next chapter of aerospace development, one iteration at a time.