Reducing Software Acquisition Risk: Best Practices for the Early Acquisition Phases
Abstract
With the focus on new acquisition practices, the opportunity exists for identifying and implementing a comprehensive set of software acquisition best practices designed to reduce risk in the acquisition of software-intensive system. In 2004, the authors published a technical report that described such a comprehensive set of software acquisition best practices for a system development contract. The acquisition of large, complex software-intensive systems has historically been fraught with major problems, including performance deficiencies, extensive software defects, and cost and schedule overruns. Furthermore, these software development problems usually do not manifest themselves until late in the development life cycle. This has led to the question of what can be done early in the acquisition life cycle to reduce the risk of these software problems occurring later in the program. This is an especially important question for the United States Air Force (USAF) Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), since there have recently been several large, complex, software-intensive SMC programs in the early acquisition phases. To answer this question, the authors have identified an additional set of software acquisition best practices for the early acquisition life cycle phases that extend those published in 2004. This paper addresses software acquisition best practices for the early National Security Space (NSS) acquisition life cycle phases (Pre-KDP A and Phase A). These best practices are targeted toward reducing downstream software development risk, and thereby improving mission success for software-intensive space systems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 31, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA446815
Entities
People
- K. L. Owens
- M. A. Rich
- R. J. Adams
- S. Eslinger
Organizations
- The Aerospace Corporation