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Under contract to the Program Executive Office for Cruise Missiles and Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (PEO-CU), Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
has developed a set of criteria to facilitate the management of system development milestones (technical reviews and audits such as Critical Design Review and Functional Configuration Audit) for a system development effort. These milestones are usually meetings that require a significant amount of preparation and travel. The presence of many individuals such as users, acquisition managers, systems engineers, integrators, developers, test engineers, and regulators is required. Much time, effort and money may be wasted for a milestone that has not achieved a state of readiness that assures successful completion.
A management tool to aid in determining both readiness and successful completion is very useful. The criteria provides a means to verify that the stage is adequately set for a milestone to begin and that the milestone adequately complies with requirements and standards. The criteria are provided in the form of a checklist applicable for each milestone. The checklist enumerates items that are the responsibility of various players of the system acquisition process (e.g., the system acquirer, the system developer, the Independent Verification and Validation agent). This checklist is intended to identify, if appropriate, products and activities that are not complete, available, or of sufficient quality, and provides a basis from which to enforce standard practices. The likelihood of successful completion of an event and the most judicious use of resources is therefore increased. The framework for the criteria is based on IEEE STD-1074 (Standard for Developing Software Life Cycle Processes) and the requirements of MIL-STD-1521B. For each system development milestone, a set of inputs, entry criteria, activities, outputs, exit criteria, and metrics are listed and a point-of-contact responsible for each listed item is declared. Each set is packaged into a "kernel" (see Figure 1). There is one "kernel" for each specific milestone event. The complete set of kernel elements provides a basis for determining the successful completion and pass/fail of a system development milestone event. Deviations from items listed in the kernels are risk items that should be mitigated.
Figure 1: Milestone Kernel Format
Entry criteria are the conditions that must be present before a milestone event can occur. Inputs are the products (documents, briefing material, agreements, etc.) that must be available and the activities that must be completed in preparation for the event. Strict adherence to the entry criteria and inputs provides a high level of assurance that appropriate products are available and have been verified to be of sufficient quality to begin the milestone event. Actions are the activities that occur during the course of the event. Outputs are the products that must be available for the event to be considered complete. Exit criteria are the conditions under which the event is complete. Metrics are based on a basic set of metrics mandated for the management of DoD systems acquisition in such references as DODI 5000.2 and ASAF Acquisition Policy 93M-17. Specific size, effort, schedule, quality, and rework metrics are defined for each milestone. Kernels are available for the following system development milestone events: System Requirements Review (SRR); System Design Review (SDR); Preliminary Design Review (PDR); Critical Design Review (CDR); Integration Readiness Review (IRR); Test Readiness Review (TRR); Physical Configuration Audit (PCA); and Functional Configuration Audit (FCA). For more information contact: