Software Is Consuming DoD Total Ownership Cost

Abstract

Department of Defense (DoD) software-intensive systems and the software content in other systems will continue to grow and may dominate total ownership costs (TOC) in the future. These costs are exacerbated by the fact that, in addition to contracted development costs, the bulk of software sustainment costs are also contracted. All of these factors indicate that DoD system software will continue to be a very expensive portion of TOC. The software engineering environment remains immature, with few, if any, industry-wide standards for software development or sustainment. The Defense Acquisition System (DAS) is significantly dependent on mature engineering. System software size and complexity are key indicators of both development costs and sustainment costs, so initial estimates are critical for predicting and controlling TOC. Unfortunately, the software size estimating processes require a significant amount of detailed understanding of the requirements and design that is typically not available when operating the DAS without supplementary analyses, tools, and techniques. Available parametric estimating tools require much of the same detailed information and are still too inaccurate to be relied upon. Similarly, understanding the potential software complexity requires in-depth understanding of the requirements and architectural design. It is clear that the DoD must conduct much more thorough requirements analyses, provide significantly more detailed operational context, and drive the software architectural design well beyond the work breakdown structure (WBS) functional design typically provided. To accomplish this, the DAS must be supplemented with tools, techniques, and analyses that are currently not present.