Jesse R. is a software engineer who works on battle management software for Land and Air Systems. He is primarily based at our Taunton, Massachusetts facility. We spoke with Jesse about his current projects and his outstanding efforts implementing Agile on a combat platform program.
What does a typical day in your current role look like?
I am currently a software engineer and scrum master on a combat platform program. As a developer, our team has primarily been working on battle management software, providing users with situational awareness tools that allow them to intelligently plan and execute based on live data from the field. A scrum master is a role within the Agile framework we are using that is most simply defined as the servant leader to the team. As a scrum master, my job is to make sure the team delivers on our commitments, solve anything blocking us, handle dependencies (internal and external), and most importantly, do whatever I can to make sure the team works together effectively.
What sparked your interest in pursuing software engineering?
I like to apply that simple idea of “taking apart something broken" in my current work. It is imperative that we all do our best to seek out things that are broken or can be improved within our products and our engineering process. The more effective we are at doing so, the more we raise our quality, user/customer satisfaction, cost effectiveness, efficiency and most importantly, our engineers' sanity.
Can you tell us more about the software you’re working on?
From a software perspective, battle management applications are typically large and monolithic, so we are working to modernize by using a microservice architecture. This involves breaking key pieces of functionality into individual services, which allows us to later deliver a completely custom product depending on customer needs. This makes the software much more lightweight in most cases because a customer can ask for a specific list of features and only receive those features.
If the software is just one large thick-client application, the customer suffers the extra bloat of having features they do not need, which wastes disk space and potentially compute resources. There are additional benefits to containerized software; you can easily add a lot of resiliency to your system by adding a container orchestration engine like Kubernetes. Container orchestration allows you to distribute containers across multiple machines (hardware or virtualized) in your environment, so that if one or more fail, your services will keep running.
We are also working on a DevSecOps pipeline, collaborative tools that allow verified external users to work in tandem with us and my specialty: interpreting and applying principles of the Agile software development framework.
What has been the most significant takeaway for you from this project?
Change is difficult and necessary. I encourage people to embrace positive change, but also learn when and how to compromise along the way. Remember that there is no “one size fits all" process you can apply to every program or solution, so work together with your team to determine what will work best for you. On a completely unrelated note, it also never hurts to have a positive attitude and a good sense of humor.
Like many engineers, Jesse’s love for building new things started at the early age of six-years-old with an endless passion for Lego sets.
What advice would you give to others?
Talk to each other! There are so many incredibly talented people working here, and someone working a different program could have a perfect solution to your problem that you don't know about. To flip that around, if you have something you're working on that you're excited about, share it! Write up an article, give a presentation, find a way to transfer that knowledge to others.
