STARS (Software Technology for Adaptable, Reliable Systems) is a long-term ARPA project aimed at advancing the management, quality, adaptability, and reliability of DoD software intensive systems Over the years, the STARS project has gradually focused on enabling a paradigm shift of DoD software practices to megaprogramming. The central megaprogramming concept is a process-driven, two-life-cycle approach to software development. One life-cycle spans the creation and enrichment of an organization's capabilities for a family of related products, or domain engineering. The other life-cycle spans the construction and delivery of individual products, or instances from the domain. This approach may provide substantial opportunity for leveraged reuse, that is, planned use of adapted software components in multiple products. Much of the effort to date has been for developing tools and processes that support megaprogramming. The STARS project is now in a transition and demonstration phase. One of the demonstration projects is in the domain of simulator-based training, specifically the U.S. Navy's domain of Air Vehicle Training Systems. If megaprogramming proves useful in this domain, it promises dramatic increases in productivity along with corresponding reductions in the cost of building simulations.

Previous experience reports have focused on pilot efforts in domain engineering for sub-domains of the Air Vehicle Training Systems (AVTS) domain such as environment and navigation simulation. These pilot efforts have demonstrated that the processes and tools are sufficiently mature for full scale domain engineering for AVTS - which the demonstration project is proceeding to do. This paper summarizes the lessons learned from the pilot efforts and looks ahead to the technical challenges and opportunities we anticipate in the full scale demonstration. Expected technical challenges and opportunities include:

(a) Integrating many sub-domains,

(b) Relating to non-domain engineered models,

(c) Integrating dramatically larger staffs,

(d) Relating to a real product acquisition project,

(e) Controlling adaptation, and

(f) Leveraging extra-domain assets.