Software Engineering Institute

Users and customers often have unrealistic performance expectations. To meet this challenge in military acquisition, it is not enough that program managers begin to collect unbiased data to analyze project costs and projections and that programs perform technology maturation activities, competitive prototyping, or Preliminary Design Reviews (PDRs).

Most importantly, a mutual understanding of capabilities in context and what it takes to enable them needs to be established before a project is initiated among those who determine what capabilities are required, write requirement specifications, and acquire the systems that meet specifications so that appropriate measures of performance and other quality attributes of the capabilities and their enabling systems can be determined and aligned.