Sky Warrior TRON team offers innovative solutions to daily problems

  • Published
  • By Tech. Sgt. Heather Redman
  • 15th Wing Public Affairs

After four months of working with the Defense Innovation Unit in San Diego learning software development practices from industry leading commercial companies, the 15th Wing TRON team is up and running to help Sky Warriors streamline daily tasks and get back to the mission.

“Indo-Pacific Air Forces has a mission to be ready to fight tonight,” said Capt. Eric Robinson, TRON software engineer. “However, many of our Airmen are facing problems with administrative tasks that keep them from focusing on their mission.”

TRON is a sub-section of the 15th Wing’s Aloha Spark office. Their focus is to build software that will increase Airmen’s efficiency.

Currently, TRON is working to localize a Marine Corps flight scheduling application to meet the needs of the 535th Airlift Squadron.

“The Air Force has been scheduling flights the same way for over 75 years,” said Tech. Sgt. Patrick Kelly, TRON software engineer. “The manual process was done on a whiteboard or excel document and would take several hours to de-conflict issues. By tailoring the USMC’s PUCKBOARD, the 535th AS will be able to schedule flights, input personnel, and see conflicts instantly.”

By working with TRON on the PUCKBOARD app, the 535th AS is estimated to gain up to eight hours of scheduling time that can be used to train for global airlift, airdrop, and aeromedical evacuation operations.

“Our focus is on software development that will optimize Airmen’s time, by identifying broken processes, developing technology workarounds, and automating administration tasks,” said Kelly.

To help Airmen leverage their duty time, TRON adopted a new method of developing software that takes advantage of industry practices to focus on outcomes versus technical specifications.

“In the past, software development followed the same process making a request, then identifying the problem,” said Kelly. “With contracting, development, and testing procedures, previous software engineering practices could take up to eight years to complete.”

The TRON process focuses on continuous development while keeping the warfighter in mind.

TRON uses the Agile methodology which keeps end users involved during the development phase and allows software engineers the flexibility they need to change the product as needed. This flexibility has reduced the eight-year development standard to less than one year.

Sky Warriors interested in reducing their administration time can submit a TRON ticket at alohaspark.org/problems.