InformationWeek

One of the toughest challenges in making that move is training the Baltimore sector's 1,450 engineers, 750 of which are systems and software developers, in a common set of object technology skills tailored to the defense contractor's business needs. The Northrop unit is taking an unusual approach to achieve that goal: It's partnering with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and consulting firm Blueprint Technologies Inc. to develop a training program, the Object Academy. The program represents a big commitment by Northrop and the developers who participate.

Students spend one day a week at the university during a four-month semester attending a series of courses presented by Blueprint consultants. For the rest of the week, they return to their in-house projects to practice their new skills.

"Employees come in on a Monday and learn about requirements management or object analysis, and they get back to work Tuesday through Friday to apply the techniques that they learned," says Roger Hebden, VP of information and education at Blueprint, in McLean, Va., and one of six program instructors.

Classes are limited to 15 employees to ensure that each has plenty of time to interact with instructors. About 50 have graduated since the first classes began last spring. Hundreds more are expected to go through the training during the next few years.

The $2.7 billion Northrop unit, which supplies military and civil technology such as radar and infrared processing systems, embarked on the move to objects two years ago after it decided the technology could cut the time and cost needed to develop new systems. Object-oriented technology lets engineers design components, or blocks of code, that can be used in future applications. To maximize reuse, developers across the sector need to be trained in the same tools and techniques. "This is a methodology that allows you to gain much more efficiency, especially if the whole development team is educated in the same principle," says Greg Hodges, a Northrop systems software engineer who is a graduate of the academy and helped start the program.

That's why Northrop got together with University of Maryland--Baltimore County, and Blueprint, a specialist in component-based technology, to tailor a program to its needs. Each semester, Blueprint consultants teach Northrop analysts, developers, and project managers five related courses, including object-oriented project management, architecting distributed software systems, and object-oriented analysis and design.

The program is taught using technologies that will be applied at Northrop, including Unified Modeling Language, a standard for modeling and communicating object-oriented analysis and design, and Rational RequisitePro, a Windows-based tool that lets project managers assess user requirements and make the data available to the development team.

Object-oriented technology works well at companies that manufacture products of similar designs. For example, Northrop's F-16 and F-22 fighters are similar, and software engineers can use some objects interchangeably in the development of those products.

Northrop says the program will help it lure systems and software engineers. Attracting IT staff is a big a concern at Northrop. Despite the shrinking defense market, the electronics sector says new global military contracts have resulted in the need to recruit 300 engineers this year, predominantly systems and software developers.

At the same time, Northrop is under intense pressure to cut costs. The reallocation of funds from defense efforts to other areas of national interest puts pressure on the company to compete more aggressively against the likes of Boeing Co. and Raytheon Co. to win commercial and military contracts. "Large defense expenditures that were aimed at thwarting communism were diverted. However, the need to have quick-reacting systems that support our defense hasn't gone away," Hodges says.

It's too early to measure the cost benefits of Northrop's move to object technology. That's because it takes time to create object-oriented systems, and the payoff will only be seen when components from those systems are reused in a second system instead of having to be created from scratch. Eventually, "we expect to be more competitive on new projects" through the use of object-oriented technology, Hodges says. After one to three years, the unit will be able to directly compare the money spent on training with the savings in faster development through object-oriented software reuse.

As an example of the kind of results the sector expects to realize once the entire development team is using object-oriented technology, Northrop says developers and engineers in different business areas within the sector, who are deploying other types of software reuse strategies, have increased productivity by as much as 20% to 30%. Since deploying software reuse initiatives throughout the sector, Northrop's reuse measurement has increased from 22% to 30%.