TINKER AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. -- The 76th Software Engineering Group at Tinker Air Force Base lives by the motto “Excellence in all we do” and they have the hardware to show for it.
The group was recently named the winner of the 2021 Rear Admiral Grace M. Hopper award for Software Maintenance Excellence, which is part of the Secretary of Defense Maintenance Awards Selection. This program recognizes the DOD’s most outstanding military maintenance units in four categories: Sustainment Training, Advice, and Assistance of Foreign Military Forces Award; the Robert T. Mason Award for Depot Maintenance Excellence; the Rear Admiral Grace M. Hopper Award for Software Maintenance Excellence; and the field-level awards.
Rick McIver, 76th SWEG director, said he could not be more proud of his team.
“This recognition is a testament to the outstanding work employees of the 76th SWEG are doing every day to innovate and provide critical software capabilities to our nation’s warfighters at the speed of relevance,” he said.
The 76th SWEG Extreme Digital Development Group-Enterprise Team distinguished itself by pursuing internal capabilities to rapidly innovate, develop, integrate and deploy warfighting capabilities. Through in-depth weapon system engineering knowledge, paired with Agile and Development Security Operations principles, they grew to lead innovation for weapon systems software across the DOD.
The 76th SWEG acted as the primary technical advisor for the standard and provided the warfighter and contractors with training and tools to implement Open Mission Systems across the enterprise. This included a government-developed Critical Abstraction Layer, a multimillion-dollar piece of software, which allowed the warfighter and smaller contractors to design Open Mission Systems Compliant systems without vendor lock issues.
The group’s efforts enabled 11 programs and 12 contactors to successfully apply Open Mission Systems to improve warfighter efficiency and reduce the risk of vendor lock.
“With the mission of ‘providing the best value software engineering solutions (for the Air Force), enabling global airpower,’ the 76th SWEG is certainly following through and executing real solutions to the most demanding problems the DOD faces today,” McIver said.