By Mike Phillips
Principal Researcher
Acquisition Support Program

In my preceding blog post, I promised to provide more examples highlighting the importance of software sustainment in the US Department of Defense (DoD). My focus is on certain configurations of weapons systems that are no longer in production for the United States Air Force, but are expected to remain a key component of our defense capability for decades to come, and thus software upgrade cycles need to refresh capabilities every 18 to 24 months. Throughout this series on efficient and effective software sustainment, I will highlight examples from each branch of the military. This second blog post describes effective sustainment engineering efforts in the Air Force, using examples from across the service’s Air Logistics Centers (ALCs).

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 By Mike Phillips
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Acquisition Support Program

Our SEI blog has included thoughtful discussions about sustaining software, such as the two-part post “The Growing Importance of Sustaining Software for the DoD.” Software sustainment is growing in importance as the lifetimes of hardware systems greatly exceed the normal lifetime of software systems they are partnered with, as well as when system functionality increasingly depends on software elements. This blog post—the first in a multi-part series—provides specific examples of the importance of software sustainment in the Department of Defense (DoD), where software upgrade cycles need to refresh capabilities every 18 to 24 months on weapon systems that have been out of production for many years, but are expected to maintain defense capability for decades.

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Part 2: SEI R&D Activities Related to Sustaining Software for the DoD
By Douglas C. Schmidt,
Deputy Director, Research, and Chief Technology Officer

Software sustainment is growing in importance as the inventory of DoD systems continues to age and greater emphasis is placed on efficiency and productivity in defense spending. In part 1 of this series, I summarized key software sustainment challenges facing the DoD.  In this blog posting, I describe some of the R&D activities conducted by the SEI to address these challenges.

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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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