Transitioning to an Innovative DSO Environment for SDRs (TIDES)

The continued modernization of MIDS to improve testability, cybersecurity, and reducing cycle times for fielding results in a need to apply DevSecOps (DSO) to enhance the software development and delivery process. NextGen’s Transitioning to an Innovative DSO Environment for SDRs (TIDES) includes two elements that supplement existing environments and processes: a new DSO Environment (software factory) for technical innovation, and Training & Process Improvement for cultural innovation. The DSO environment executes CI/CD pipelines to build, scan, test, and deploy on each code commit. Through training and process improvement, we provide education and best practice guidance on DSO principles and techniques, including recommendations on how to apply Agile methods (such as Scrum development) that use the DSO environment to maximize delivery velocity. During the Base Period, TIDES enables requirement refinement, DSO factory selection, DSO toolchain design, DSO process design, development of a transition strategy, and a feasibility demonstration. After the feasibility demonstration, during the Option Period, TIDES empowers onboarding of MIDS to the selected factory, migrating the demonstration pipeline, preparing for the pilot project, and planning for Phase II execution.   The TIDES approach is built on successful DSO Software Factory development and operations for Joint community customers, aligned with the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Reference Design. TIDES incorporates simulation-based testing through SADIE, an innovative tool for the integration and orchestration of modeling and simulation within CI/CD pipelines and allowing for stimulation of a System Under Test using synthetic environments to provide representative test data using existing interfaces/protocols. TIDES also includes a sandbox model where the test environment is containerized for standardization to support runtime testing. The sandbox model containers explicitly define SCA-compliant operating environments for testing SDR software.