To stay ahead of competitive threats, Lockheed Martin needed to upgrade its development process using an agile methodology and DevSecOps practices. “When you have a world-renowned platform like the F-22 Raptor, adversaries are constantly looking for ways to counter it,” said Michael Cawood, Vice President of F-16/F-22 product development with Lockheed Martin. “This means we must constantly add capabilities and improve the F-22. And we must do it faster than ever before. We needed to transform our own organization and how we did things.”

Lockheed Martin chose Red Hat Open Innovation Labs to help them transform from waterfall development to an agile approach—while disentangling its web of embedded systems. Together, Lockheed Martin and Red Hat built an open architecture to accelerate application development and delivery. “By working with the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs team, we changed everything—our toolchain, our process, and most importantly, our culture,” said Cawood. “With our new culture firmly rooted in DevSecOps and agile, and a more flexible platform based on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the F-22 team will continue its work to ensure the Raptor meets America’s defense needs.”

Lockheed Martin’s new processes and platform eliminated multiple-day design reviews. The company now demonstrates capability maturity with each sprint. In addition, Lockheed Martin now builds a minimum viable product (MVP) to deliver capabilities to the customer as quickly as possible. The F-22 Raptor scrum team has improved its ability to forecast for future sprints by 40%, and only 1 year after starting its project, Lockheed Martin is slated to deliver new F-22 communications capabilities 3 years ahead of schedule. “With the Red Hat partnership, we can see the day when we develop a capability, fly it the next day, and deliver it to the warfighter in a way similar to how we receive updates on our mobile devices,” said Cawood.