Successful military operations are built on meticulous planning and testing. Commanders simulate the impact of strikes, wargame enemy responses, and plan for multiple scenarios and outcomes. When the time for action arrives, troops are prepared to execute strategies and tactics that have been thoroughly tested and refined.
Defense agencies should adopt a similar detailed approach to testing their software, including the technologies used to simulate combat conditions. Even a minor bug in the code, for example, can crash a system and lead to dire consequences on the battlefield.
In today’s defense software landscape, simply checking the compliance box is not enough. Testing must evolve to be continuous, intelligent, and deeply integrated into every stage of the software development life cycle to improve software quality, reduce operational risk, and enhance mission readiness.
The hard truth about public sector software testing
While software testing is standard practice within the federal government, agencies can still struggle to keep pace with modern software demands in our current climate. Staff are often required to balance rapid delivery with shrinking teams and complex digital environments. These factors often force teams to prioritize speed over completeness.
Inadequate testing is especially perilous for agencies modernizing legacy systems or consolidating ERP platforms. These fragile systems can contain hidden dependencies or undocumented code, and a single change can cause critical system outages or create vulnerabilities. Without comprehensive software testing, teams risk introducing problems that can be difficult and costly to fix retroactively.
Indeed, failing to integrate modern software testing into the development process is highly counterproductive to the Secretary of Defense’s mandate to accelerate software delivery. Bugs, redundancy, and poor tooling slow down development cycles, causing teams to spend time reworking code or duplicating efforts. This can harm morale and productivity, and it does not support agencies’ efforts to achieve maximum efficiency.
The solution to balancing speed and quality
Integrating rigorous, continuous, and automated AI-enhanced testing into the development cycle is key to achieving both speed and quality.
Manual software testing is time-consuming and challenging, requires additional resources, monopolizes developers’ time, and is susceptible to human error. Agencies using this traditional method are unable to keep up with their rapid release timetables. As a result, many are forced to narrow the scope of their testing—prioritizing speed over thoroughness—because manual testing is too onerous and doesn’t scale.
Using AI to scan code and identify bugs, lags, vulnerabilities, and other issues significantly accelerates the process. Teams can use AI to automatically identify and alert them to changes to core systems so they know where to prioritize their testing, helping developers save time. They can also leverage AI and automation to scan code, verify it’s operating as intended and free from vulnerabilities, test its performance, and identify data integrity issues.
All of this should be done continuously throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). Embedding automated, AI-driven testing into the SDLC enables teams to continue developing at speed. They can detect anomalies early and throughout the cycle, fix them along the way, and confidently deploy mission-ready software at launch.
Of course, defense agency representatives are rightfully concerned about the trustworthiness of AI systems. In a recent Tricentis survey, a healthy number of government respondents—39%—expressed concern about security vulnerabilities, while another 36% are worried about AI bias. Any AI testing system an agency considers must be transparent and, if in the United States, aligned with the Pentagon’s 2023 Data, Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence Adoption Strategy, which emphasizes responsibility, safety, and speed of integration. Teams should understand how the system arrives at conclusions, and inputs and outputs should remain internal to preserve data security.
The U.S. Army showcases the effectiveness of software testing
The U.S. Army’s efforts to develop a new Light Weight Launch Command Unit (LW CLU) and shoulder-fired G-model missile demonstrate why rigorous software testing is essential to defense operations. The Army employed rigorous software testing in the production of these defense systems, checking for possible issues and points of failure, issuing software updates as needed, and verifying issue resolution before the system moved into full-rate production.
Notably, the tests also surfaced hardware-related challenges. The Army discovered that the performance of the batteries used in LW CLU tended to degrade in cold weather. Their tests allowed them to rectify this issue before deployment, exemplifying that software testing can reveal broader system-level issues that might otherwise go undetected.
This case underscores the importance of validating how software performs in real-world conditions, not just in controlled environments. It also highlights the critical role of continuous testing in helping defense teams isolate problems, implement fixes, and confidently field technology that performs when it matters most.
Conclusion: Using AI and automation to build software assurance
As defense agencies continue to modernize their systems and implement innovative software solutions, rigorous software testing is no longer optional. There’s too much at stake, both from an operational and financial perspective.
Fortunately, organizations can make software testing more effective, efficient, and intelligent than ever before. Automation and AI enable agencies to integrate software assurance into their development processes without overburdening teams or derailing timelines, helping teams feel confident in their mission-critical initiatives.