Why NASA Uses Stash – It’s Not Rocket Science

As you can probably imagine air traffic control is not an area in which you’d like to have issues with code and so NextGen turned to Git, the leading repository model. However, because NextGen work closely with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), they needed a solution that would allow collaboration within their team of 150 software engineers, and would be safe behind the NASA firewall. They turned to Stash – Atlassian’s Git repository management system for enterprise environments.

As Michael Eshow, an aerospace engineer who manages the team’s real-time development projects, said in an interview with Kyt Dotson over at Devops Angle, it’s all about permissions for the NextGen team.

“We’re in a continuous prototyping, experimental environment here. The distributed capabilities of Stash allow our developers and experimenters to pull code to authorized devices via strict user authentication so developers can work remotely without being connected to a network,” said Eshow. “In the past, remote or off-line development involved manual packaging and moving of code, and manual re-integration of code modifications. Stash supports remote and off-line development natively.”

With NASA’s studious approach to repository management, essential within the aeronautics industry, Stash was their preferred choice. Having used Stash since May 2012, NASA now have over 40 Stash and 200 Git repos, and all issues are tracked using JIRA too.

Clearvision work with a number of large organisations, such as NASA, to implement a sustainable and secure software development environment. We have a clear understanding of how Git and Stash work at Enterprise level (we ran a Git/Stash session at Summit ’13).