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IDA conducted a case study of the Navy's F/A-18E/F program to document lessons learned from a DoD program using advanced acquisition and development methods. The prime contractor, McDonnell Douglas Corporation (MDC), used the Integrated Product and Process Development (IPPD) management philosophy to design and produce the F/A-18E/F tactical aircraft. Five concepts are key to IPPD: (1) customer focus, (2) concurrent development of processes and products, (3) multidisciplinary teamwork, (4) proactive identification and management of risk, and (5) integrated information environment. This case study shows from the contractor's perspective how the activities of the F/A-18E/F program related to each of the five concepts.

The purposes of this study were to undertake an initial characterization of DoD mission critical software maintenance; to identify policy issues; and to outline the scope and major features of potential new or revised policy. We distinguished among three categories of mission related software. Within a category different organizations may use similar processes; across categories they generally do not. For six specific types of software maintenance, we accounted for about 16,000 government and contract personnel equivalents (55% organic and 45% contractor) maintaining 225M lines of code at an annual cost of about $1.26B. About 40 percent of the effort is corrective and 60 percent is a combination of adaptive and incremental improvement. Pure organic maintenance is the exception for any type of software; organic maintenance of embedded software is generally found only on older models of weapon systems; where attempted, competitive contract support proved both more economical and at least as effective as either sole source contract support or organic support. Written policy consists of MIL-STDs (e.g., 2167 and 498) and local operating instructions rather than DoD instructions or Service regulations. There is a lack of consensus over what software maintenance is also depot maintenance.

Establishing and operating software repositories are important elements in the DoD's plan to encourage software reuse. One way to manage such repositories is through a fee-for-service arrangement, which involves charging a fee to the users of the repositories and using the proceeds to reimburse the repository for costs incurred in providing products and services. This paper examines the economic foundations for setting prices for repository products and services that strike an optimal balance between encouraging reuse and recovering costs. We argue that the most important issue in pricing is ownership of the assets. We believe that the most likely outcome under government ownership is a repository full of unusable and unused software assets, and maintain that private ownership would create incentives to supply truly reusable assets. In addition, the private ownership scheme eliminates the government's responsibility for dealing with the complicated problems associated with setting the price of repository assets and a few repository services.

IDA Paper P-2863 reports on a comparison by IDA of two Air Force maintenance information systems. One of the systems is CAMS/REMIS, which combines the Core Automated Management System (CAMS) with the Reliability and Maintainability Information System (REMIS). The other is the Interim CAMS and REMIS Reporting System (TICARRS). Before Paper P-2863 was released in its final version, IDA gave interested parties the opportunity to comment upon it. This document contains the comments provided to IDA by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Air Force, Litton Computer Services, and Dynamics Research Corporation. It also contains IDA's responses to the comments received.

This report presents our recommendations for a basic set of software measures that Department of Defense (DoD) organizations can use to help plan and manage the acquisition, development, and support of software systems. These recommendations are based on work that was initiated by the Software Metrics Definition Working Group and subsequently extended by the SEI to support the DoD Software Action Plan. The central theme is the use of checklists to create and record structured measurement descriptions and reporting specifications. These checklists provide a mechanism for obtaining consistent measures from project to project and for communicating unambiguous measurement results. Software management metrics, Software metrics, Software measurement, DoD Software metrics, Software measures, Software Action Plan (SWAP).

This report contains guidelines for defining, recording, and reporting staff-hours. In it we develop a framework for describing staff-hour definitions, and use that framework to construct operational methods for reducing misunderstandings in measurement results. We show how to employ the framework to resolve conflicting user needs, and we apply the methods to construct specifications for measuring staff-hours. We also address two different but related aspects of schedule measurement. One aspect concerns the dates of project milestones and deliverables, and the second concerns measures of progress. Examples of forms for defining and reporting staff-hour and schedule measurements are illustrated.

The Software Technology Economic Impact Model was developed by IDA for use in analyzing the effect that improvements in software technology have on the total DoD development and maintenance costs of weapon systems. The model displays the costs savings that result from three major sources: work avoidance, working smarter, and working faster. This user's manual gives instructions for installing and starting the model on an IBM or IBM-compatible PC or an Apple Macintosh computer. It also describes how to modify the baseline parameters of the model and how to estimate both development and maintenance cost savings using the model. Illustrations included show examples of the screens the user will see when maneuvering through the model., IDA/HQ-91-38005, SBI-ADE501496.

The purpose of this report is to encourage and facilitate the use of appropriate software cost and schedule models in the Department of Defense. This report provides an introduction to the usefulness of these models and an evaluation of current, fully supported, commercially available, software cost and schedule estimation products. These products can be employed for analyses of several different aspects of software management including: 1) Project planning - to arrive at an early estimate of resource requirements and identify tradeoffs between cost and schedule; 2) Proposal evaluation - to assess the realism of contract proposals and assist in negotiation; 3) Managing development - to track resources, get early warning of deviation from plan, and assess alternatives for corrective action; 4) Managing maintenance - to estimate and track the cost of maintenance and enhancement and identify appropriate timing for a new start; and 5) Improving software productivity - to evaluate methodologies and tools which may increase productivity. An important advantage of these parametric models is that they make visible the many assumptions about the product and the development organization that enter into an estimate. These assumptions are therefore open to discussion, validation, and assessment of alternatives. This visibility provides a basis for assessing risk, evaluating reasonableness of a plan, and taking management action or negotiating a bid. In summary, software cost and schedule models form a basis for sharpening software management skills.

Software Design, Description, and Analysis Tools are tools that will assist in the design, construction, and maintenance of WIS Ada software. This category of tools will include; object manager, Ada PDL tools, categorization scheme tool, reusable components library system, test and evaluation tools, software metrics analyzer, and a set of management tools. This volume is the third of a nine-volume set describing projects which are planned for prototype foundation technologies for WIS using the Ada programming language. The other volumes include command language; text processing; database management system; planning and optimization tools; graphics; operating systems; and network protocols., See also Volume 4, ADA178435.

This manual describes the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Application Software Size Estimating Tool (DASSET). DASSET consists of a module for software sizing and two commercially available software cost models (SLIM and WICOMO). The software sizing module and the underlying algorithms were developed by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) for use by DLA to give size estimates (measured in thousands of delivered source lines of code in COBOL or its equivalent). These size estimates are based on information contained in the Information Usage Models (IUMs) of the Business Area Analyses (BAAs) following the methodology described by Technology Information Products (TIP). A database within DASSET contains the information needed to generate size estimates for all functions that are currently contained within the BAAs.

The purpose of this study is to address human engineering issues as they relate to the Joint Service Software Engineering Environment (JSSEE) and, in the particular, to discuss their impact on the development methodology, supporting tools, and the JSSEE architecture. The purpose is not to address what constitutes 'good' human engineering of an environment except at a very high level, since much of that can only be answered within the context of the entire environment. Rather, the objective is to outline the approach that is needed to ensure that human engineering goals are incorporated in a meaningful way and that human engineering methods and tools are successfully integrated into the overall development methodology. Keywords: Software engineering environment; Human engineering; Human factors; Software user interface; Environment architecture.