Software Productivity Trends and Issues (Conference Paper)

The Department of Defense is experiencing an explosive increase in its demand for software-implemented features in weapon systems. The combination of exponential increases in computing power and similar advances in memory density and speed has made software-mediated implementation of system features increasingly attractive. In the meantime, defense software productivity and industrial base capacity have not been growing as quickly. Do we have an impending bottleneck? If so, what are the management implications?