Using Quality Attributes to Improve Acquisition

Abstract

In all the work weve done in independent technical assessments and various other direct support-to-government programs, weve noticed that a significant cause of failure and one of the things that causes a lot of government programs to fail is that the acquisition strategyand Ill say what I mean by that in just a secondand the architecture dont much up, that they have incompatibilities between them. Were pretty used to understanding the architecture and what that is that governs the system and the software. The acquisition strategy is one or more documents. Its usually many documents that actually govern the structure of how the software is acquired. When those two go in different directions, which they often do because the government has a tendency to have one group of people develop the acquisition strategy, because they are acquisitions specialists, and a completely different group of people develop the architecture, because they are software or system specialists, and they never talk to each other. When you start to get interactions between these thingsfor example, we might have an acquisition strategy that states we are going to award the contract to six different companies but essentially, building one large monolithic structure it just doesnt fit. Those mismatches are what we are trying to resolve.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2021
Accession Number
AD1145848

Entities

People

  • Patrick R.H. Place
  • Suzanne Miller

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Aircrafts
  • Airplanes
  • Commerce
  • Contractors
  • Contracts
  • Department Of Defense
  • Engineering
  • Governments
  • Misalignment
  • Online Communications
  • Procurement
  • Software Design
  • Software Development
  • Specialists

Readers

  • Defense Acquisition Program Management
  • Educational Psychology
  • Software Engineering.