Agile Assurance and Acceptance

Many defence and security organisations are already embracing digital initiatives, autonomous systems and the use of agile development techniques. Their aim is simply to bring new capabilities into service quickly using ‘fail-fast’ approaches to innovation, harnessing the potential of Commercial and Military Off-the-Shelf (COTS and MOTS) technologies to gain technological advantage over potential adversaries. However, organisations can often struggle to bridge the divide between agile development and operationalisation, particularly for complex weapons or command and control systems where more traditional, waterfall approaches to systems engineering/capability integration are the norm. Digital development teams can also be unfamiliar with the potential impacts of environmental constraints faced by the military such as limited bandwidth, or intermittent communications. 

QinetiQ is supporting defence and security customers with a new range of Digital T&E services. By bringing together agile delivery approaches, DevSecOps, digital twins, advanced analytical capabilities with our deep T&E, capability integration, security and communications expertise, QinetiQ has the ‘know how’ to help clients deliver their innovation agendas and to field new capabilities at pace. Through an innovative hybrid approach and a clear focus on delivering tangible mission outcomes, QinetiQ’s T&E and security experts work alongside agile development teams to ensure that capabilities being developed using agile techniques can be operationalised in short order, maximising the return on investment for our clients.

A subset of our wider Digital T&E offering, QinetiQ’s agile assurance and acceptance services include: 

• Expertise in enabling agile approaches to capability assurance, accreditation and acceptance embedded in all phases of the Government Digital Services Alpha, Beta Live methodology; ensuring regulatory, security and systems engineering compliance with standards such as JS 440, JSP 604, Def Stan 21-088 and 21-059.
• Provision of agile capability development expertise together with capability integration, testing, communications and cyber expertise.
• Validation and integration of digital twins to test and assure complex mission and safety critical systems, and systems of systems, and subsequent changes to these.