Helping Government Software Teams Move Faster | Carnegie Mellon's Robin Yeman

**Robin Yeman** (0:00)
The Department of Defense and the Intelligence Communities really started looking at the environment and saying, hey, we have to go faster, right? Currently today, if we were to launch a satellite, it takes 90 months. That's just too long, right? And we've got new entrants into the market, like SpaceX or Relativity, and they can do it so much faster. Why is that, how is that? My goals and objectives are really to enable government organizations to become digital, so that they can do Agile, they can do DevOps, they can do model-based systems engineering, they can build digital twins, they can bring in artificial intelligence and machine learning. I usually refer to this as all of the tools in your digital engineering value stream.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:46)
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**Robin Yeman** (1:37)
Yes. It was actually a fantastic experience. I did a talk on human collisions. It was right during that time during COVID, where we were like, yeah, everybody's working from home. But what things weren't happening, right? We hadn't actually gotten good at this whole working virtually, really engaging with one another. And so, really talked about making sure that we can still do that, right? Because some of the best ideas happened when I ran into you at the lunchroom.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:07)
Totally.

**Robin Yeman** (2:07)
Not necessarily when I was like banging away at my keyboard.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:11)
We have to be really intentional about the social design, the social circuitry of these hybrid or remote organizations. Because you can create that kind of extemporaneous collaboration. But if you're not intentional about it, you fall into these negative patterns as you bring up. And this item sure spans from your expertise over the years. You've spent over 28 years in software engineering with a focus on digital engineering, DevSecOps, Agile, and you've been a leader. You've built large complex solutions across multiple domains. In fact, you have a pioneering research that you've done in collaboration with IT Revolution, and a number of other industry experts over the last five years. And you're releasing a book now, as my understanding of it, but with a set of proven success patterns, and it's under the title Industrial DevOps. Can you tell us a little bit about the book?

**Robin Yeman** (2:55)
Yeah, absolutely. So we've seen huge success over the last, let's say, two decades with Agile, right? Things have, you know, people have been able to go faster. They've reduced lead time, improved communication. DevOps expanded that. So now we've got the tooling and the automation to really deliver capabilities at the speed of relevance. I wanted to be able to do that for safety-critical cyber-physical systems, right? So during my time in engineering, I've spent a long time building systems like submarines or satellites or aircraft, things of that nature. And they also need to be able to deliver faster, have high morale, build quality in. So what happens when we take those practices that are best for, let's say, software with Agile and DevOps, and we apply them in the arena of cyber-physical systems? And what we've seen is actually even bigger results than maybe just the software alone.

**Conor Bronsdon** (4:01)
And your book's coming out October 12th, so it should be live by the time this episode is. Where's the best place for folks to find your book?

**Robin Yeman** (4:08)
Amazon, the best place, go to Amazon, it's on pre-order right now, or IT Revolution, you can also get it right from Gene's website.

**Conor Bronsdon** (4:17)
Perfect, and as you mentioned, this book has been an offshoot of your work over the last 25 years at Lockheed Martin, designing everything from secure submarines to satellites, and you also have a co-author who has experience in Northrop Grumman and beyond, correct?