Huan Truong, Senior Software Developer for the ADEV team, is the recipient of the second Tesla Innovation Award. The ADEV team managers created the award to recognize team members who employed innovation and technology to solve key issues or advance program goals. The award is named for Nikola Tesla, an inventor who is credited with creating or advancing many of the technologies that make modern life possible, including Alternating Current electricity.
Creating a suite of web applications that not only work together seamlessly but also interface with a variety of military enterprise services to provide command and control personnel with the latest information about resources (aircraft, aircrews, and airfields) and about mission schedules and timelines requires an innovative spirit. These innovations range from development efforts and Agile approaches to creating internal tools to automate efforts and simplify tracking and reporting.
Huan was recognized with the Tesla Innovation Award for creating such a tool: the Platform Application Service Tracker (PAST). The suite of web applications being developed by the ADEV team rely heavily on information accessed through the Air Mobility Command (AMC) enterprise services. Reliance on information from these web 
services, often in development stages themselves, was one of the biggest challenges faced by the ADEV team. Service outages or intermittent availability and reliability impacts development efforts and schedules. There was little hard information about overall service availability over time, plus there was no way to quickly access what services were currently available and what services were not.
PAST uses scheduled tests to access the web services on which ADEV applications rely, then displays and stores the results providing long term objective data on service availability, downtime, and functional fulfillment. The visibility and insight into web service performance that this innovative tool provides is an invaluable asset to the ADEV program.
PAST provides ADEV developers, testers, and management hard data about the services that applications need
to function as well as critical feedback to the customer and service providers about the reliability of the services. Additionally, the development of PAST was a leading factor for the modification of the AMC ADEV contract to include a Service Validation Project (SVP). This added a new Agile team and another set of highly technical challenges for the ADEV program.
Huan was also the recipient of the SuprTEK Rookie of the Year award in 2015. Brandon Sanders, a Java developer intern who is currently studying robotics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) was the first recipient of the Tesla Innovation Award. With an innovative spirit that runs high in the ADEV team, more Tesla Innovation Awards are in the works.
Don Reed is a Senior Technical Writer and Project Support Specialist with the ADEV program. His background includes engineering and programing, project management, quality and business improvement, and business-technical communication. Don has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a M.A. in Communication from Saint Louis University.
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