Managing Mdo Software Development Projects

Over the past decade, the NASA Langley Research Center developed a series of "grand challenge" applications demonstrating the use of parallel and distributed computation and multidisciplinary design optimization. All but the last of these applications were focused on the high-speed civil transport vehicle; the final application focused on reusable launch vehicles. Teams of discipline experts developed these multidisciplinary applications by integrating legacy engineering analysis codes. As teams became larger and the application development became more complex with increasing levels of fidelity and numbers of disciplines, the need for applying software engineering practices became evident. This paper briefly introduces the application projects and then describes the approaches taken in project management and software engineering for each project; lessons learned are highlighted.