NASA is a big name in the aeronautics field even beyond the public consciousness of knowing NASA means “going into space”; but beyond being the Star Trek of the modern era, NASA also works tirelessly to make the skies safer. One of NASA’s teams out of Armes Research Center is part of a project known as NextGen (short for “Next Generation Air Transportation System”) and it’s their job to produce software solutions for dealing with ever-increasing air traffic across the United States.

Air traffic control is a coding space that has terrible consequences for failures and requires a lot of highly engineered products that have been time tested and well proven to survive the unexpected. The team working on NextGen is comprised of over 150 software engineers all of whom might be plugging away at their own small part of the entire elegant system and they must be able to do so without causing trouble for someone else.

“We build real-time tools that help air traffic controllers more efficiently guide airplanes to runways or meter flights through busy air space,” explained Michelle Eshow, an aerospace engineer who manages the team’s real-time development projects. “We also build big, fast-time simulations that model the whole system and look at future concepts, like what would happen if traffic doubled.”

Atlassian Stash as for demystifying code generation for large teams

Not exactly the space that DevOps is expected to prevail—unlike the mobile industry (the common focus of DevOpsAngle lately) air traffic control isn’t looking to do continuous releases, they’re looking to produce a hard-and-solid product that simulates well in testing, integrates nicely with multiple teams, and remains secure as it goes through the development and operations deployment process.

With ever-increasing responsibilities and a nose for disciplined engineering, the NASA team looked to the open source community for a solution and saw one: Git.

Git has become the de facto source repository model for the open source software community—which has grown through several from CVS to Subversion—and Git has always treated OSS developers well. NextGen wanted its capabilities to benefit their team and wanted to do so within their own secure environment, behind the NASA firewall. So they turned to Atlassian for that solution. NASA already uses Atlassian’s issue-tracker software JIRA so it seemed a simple step to integrate further and that meant Stash.

It took NextGen approximately two months from stem-to-stern to migrate from their previous solution to Stash—Atlassian’s Git repository management system for enterprise environments. In May 2012 NASA started to use Stash in its 1.0 version. Since then, the aeronautics outfit has started pushing out more code and now they have over 40 Stash and 200 Git repositories.

Security and durability is key in any mission-critical industry

The NextGen team works with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to develop advanced automation tools that provide air traffic controllers, pilots, and other airspace users with more accurate real-time information about the nation’s traffic flow, weather, and routing. Developing leading-edge software collaboratively and securely is key.

“We’re in a continuous prototyping, experimental environment here. The distributed capabilities of Stash allow our developers and experimenters to pull code to authorized devices via strict user authentication so developers can work remotely without being connected to a network,” said Eshow. “In the past, remote or off-line development involved manual packaging and moving of code, and manual re-integration of code modifications. Stash supports remote and off-line development natively.”

NASA chose Stash and Git because NextGen likes to branch everything and a repository that allows for a highly role-based granular permission system with powerful merge support would be necessary to support 150 people for a single project. NextGen branches everything from new features to bug fixes, adding the ability to track code changes back down to the issue level, but this also meant that Stash needed to upkeep a highly durable repository that could pass keen engineering muster.

A huge win for Atlassian as well as NASA

Even in popular culture, NASA is known for being no slouch when it comes to aeronautics—after all, NASA put people on the moon in the 60s, flung exploratory probes across our solar system using only the power of math (and elbow grease), and even landed a rover on Mars. Disasters in space or on planes are mission-critical not because a business will lose money, but because good people can lose their lives. NASA has a hard-earned reputation for superiority of design, testing, and scrutiny when it comes to development and innovation.

NASA has some intense rules when it comes to bringing a tool in house — who are already well known as extremely studious and disciplined engineers.

To be part of something as mission-critical as keeping the skies safe for over 5,000 high-speed vehicles streaking across the United States both Git and Stash would have to pass a vetting process designed to drop anything that showed it couldn’t put up to the rigors of careful planning, high security, and elegant engineering.