Supporting agile development and digital transformation within a tightly regulated sector

Introduction

The Software Factory is an internal initiative at Rolls-Royce, aimed at enabling agile development and delivering digital transformation, while addressing security and interoperability challenges.

Building on our long-standing partnership with Rolls-Royce, Calvium has been working with the Software Factory to help increase the capacity of the initiative to rapidly build and maintain software systems. 

Four years into its journey, the Software Factory has potential for business-wide expansion at Rolls-Royce and has become a valuable driver of learning and development for all those involved.

Background

As a major multinational engineering company, it is fundamental that Rolls-Royce can provide internal teams with a repeatable, well-defined path to create and update software within the business. 

For an organisation like this, digital transformation can present a significant challenge, often slowed by the complexity and strict regulatory demands of the highly secure industries it serves. Furthermore, there are also large legacy systems in operation, which can make integrating new technologies and systems difficult – due to their rigidity.

Seeking to address those challenges, Rolls-Royce materials engineer Josh Haines launched the Software Factory in 2021. He was inspired by the way the big tech companies such as Spotify, Facebook, Apple and Google were approaching innovation, and wanted to see if Rolls-Royce could find a way to be more efficient, fast and agile.

Today, Software Factory has evolved into a small fully-remote team, building and delivering modern software within the company. They have also supported and trained about 150 colleagues with no or minimal prior programming experience (‘citizen developers’), so they can begin to build their own ideas for digital tools and solutions within their specialisms.

Supporting an agile development process

Calvium has been an approved Rolls-Royce supplier for many years and so our deep understanding of the business and its processes, alongside our security credentials, meant we were well-positioned to partner with the Software Factory.

By adopting an agile process, it avoids heavy upfront specifications, allowing the team to work responsively and deliver solutions in a more focused and efficient way than traditional methods.

As such, when a new project is commissioned, Calvium works alongside the project champion to understand the initiative and its basic requirements. We will undertake an array of tasks depending on the needs of the project. We might be developing features for a new system or updating existing software that may be ready for refinement or scaling. 

In lieu of large upfront specifications, Calvium provides concise documentation to ensure best practice software standards and continuity, as the project evolves and teams evolve. For example, we make sure legacy code is understandable and optimised for developers who may join a project in the future.

Mutually beneficial collaboration

The nature of the Software Factory has allowed it to build an ecosystem of experts, so there is an ongoing positive learning loop whereby we are constantly picking up new skills and knowledge from one another.

Calvium brings expert knowledge and experience of bespoke and mobile software development, Rolls-Royce’s ‘citizen developers’ have deep expertise in their specialist engineering fields, and the core team of the Software Factory bring industry and organisational experience, as well as engineering and software skills. There are often other agencies working on different projects or different parts of the same project as well, which further broadens the scope for collaboration and peer-to-peer learning.

Refreshingly, the Software Factory has the kind of operational freedom needed to ensure everyone feels supported to do their best work and can see results quickly. It is an exciting and high-energy environment to be a part of.

Next steps

Calvium has contributed to several Software Factory projects to-date, and continues to contribute to mission critical software development as a Software Factory partner.

The size and scale of Rolls-Royce means there are many different processes and systems that could benefit from digital transformation in this way, such as civil aerospace, or global roll-out across the organisation. 

Looking ahead, the Software Factory will focus on refining its agile development model and ensuring that it can be effectively scaled and replicated across varied teams and projects. In addition, continued emphasis will be placed on fostering collaboration, expanding knowledge-sharing initiatives and developing new pathways for citizen developers to support digital transformation further.

To build on this momentum, Calvium will continue our partnership with Software Factory – enabling further integration of best practices and tools to streamline processes and improve efficiency.

Software Factory is not just transforming how Rolls-Royce develops software; it’s shaping the future of digital innovation within the business, and we look forward to contributing our skills to the next chapter in this exciting journey.