Part 1: Software Sustainment Trends and Challenges
By Douglas C. Schmidt,
Deputy Director, Research, and Chief Technology Officer

Department of Defense (DoD) programs have traditionally focused on the software acquisition phase (initial procurement, development, production, and deployment) and largely discounted the software sustainment phase (operations and support) until late in the lifecycle.  The costs of software sustainment are becoming too high to discount since they account for 60 to 90 percent of the total software lifecycle effort. Moreover, in an era where DoD new-start programs are being reduced in favor of prolonging legacy systems, significant software sustainment cost increases are themselves unsustainable. The growing expense and prolonging of legacy systems motivates the need for greater discipline and attention on defining and applying appropriate methods and technologies to improve sustainment capabilities and efficiencies.  This SEI blog posting—the first in a two part series—summarizes key software sustainment challenges faced by DoD; the subsequent post describes R&D activities conducted by the SEI to address some of these challenges.

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