Several projects have been delivered to site within six to nine months after project start-up. The staging of systems development within the DPL mitigates technical and schedule risks. Every DPL system, whether an engineering prototype or full production system, is developed with fundamentally the same software development process. The only variant is the degrees of formality and documentation. A full production system has a formal requirements specification document that has matured from the initial white paper requirement through user testing of the prototype and limited production capability.
All software is under configuration control.
The driving principle behind the DPL development process is the promotion of sharing and reuse of DPL assets across the product line. All DPL projects share documentation, tools, processes, and people. Software components and the image exploitation framework are reused on multiple projects. A software assets repository tailored for the application domain of the DPL allows multiple projects to use the assets. Today, the software assets repository contains the reusable architectural framework.