Future military combat systems will require ever more complicated code, but writing software that is bug free and ready for a firefight is a challenge that gets tougher every day.

The military faces a “software divergence dilemma” today. In the past 50 years, the amount of code in a typical military system has increased a hundredfold. Meanwhile, in that same span of time, the average productivity of programmers has only doubled. That means we’ve seen the “person-months of effort now required to develop a capability” increase by a factor of 50, says Jon Ogg, director of engineering and technical management at the Air Force Materiel Command.

As Barry Boehm, professor of software engineering at the University of Southern California and a pioneer in the field of cost estimation, put it, “The amount of software DoD needs is growing exponentially, and you’ll never get it done in a finite amount of time.”

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