The hidden risks of system integration. [T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing]

Vito Askins

It's a it's it's somewhat of a common phrase, in spacecraft development and mission program development where, you find that risk and technical debt accumulates, within the boundaries between everyone doing their their specific jobs.

Vito Askins

And cyber makes the problem especially visible because an adversary does not care how we've divided organizational responsibility.

Vito Askins

But I think the biggest indicators that you'll see or that I've seen in this is programs tend to get a lot of things wrong about mission readiness, so that they can label a mission ready.

Vito Askins

But integration readiness really isn't the sum of its subsystems readiness, it's the confidence that the relationships between those subsystems will still produce the intended mission outcome.

Vito Askins

And I'll give an example of that, so if you would imagine a satellite mission where the spacecraft and the ground software, the network providers, the identity management systems and all the operation environments, they all satisfy their allocated requirements.

Vito Askins

You know, space is becoming very egalitarian now and there's a lot of these Walker Delta constellation patterns going up like Starlink is the mega constellations.

Vito Askins

You you the former you can you can maybe get by with missing a key integrating point, again integration point.

Vito Askins

And I think a lot of problems with integration readiness, is that systems engineers and technical leaderships don't ask the questions or enough questions, rather they make too many assumptions. And making assumptions is fine, that's how you develop a program and you and you state your end goal and your customer readiness.

Vito Askins

Yeah, we challenge those assumptions and we remove that technical debt by creating a system that has such high fidelity between the advancement points of the development that there isn't there's not a liable gaps that can just kind of pop up out of nowhere.

Vito Askins

I think maybe technically on the professional side, the biggest thing I would leave people with is to look beyond the green status inside their own boundaries.

Vito Askins

I'm Vito Askins, I've spent more than 25 years working across the intelligence and aerospace programs in systems engineering, software, integration and test, mission operations and technical leadership.

Vito Askins

And I want integration to find the problems before integration happens.

Vito Askins

And I want the readers to see individually how reasonable decisions can accumulate into a larger thing.

Vito Askins

You know, when the the work of bees and the queen bees both have the same outlooks that they want to reach that end goal before understanding how to get to that end goal.

Maria Varmazis

In our chat today, he walks me through how missions can look green within individual subsystems, while risk and technical debt continue to accumulate at organizational and technical boundaries, only to surface during the integration phase of a mission.