1.2.2 A Risk‐Driven Process Decision Table to Guide System Development Rigor

Abstract

Abstract. The Incremental Commitment Model (ICM) organizes systems engineering and acquisition processes in ways that better accommodate the different strengths and difficulties of hardware, software, and human factors engineering approaches. As with other models trying to address a wide variety of situations, its general form is rather complex. However, its risk-driven nature has enabled us to determine a set of twelve common risk patterns and organize them into a decision table that can help new projects converge on a process that fits well with their particular process drivers. For each of the twelve special cases, the decision table provides top-level guidelines for tailoring the key activities of the ICM, along with suggested lengths between each internal system build and each external system increment delivery. This paper elaborates on each of the twelve cases and provides examples of their use.

The Incremental Commitment Model Process Patterns for Rapid-Fielding Projects

“…The ICM [2] is a new generation process model. ICM covers the full system development life cycle consisting of the Exploration phase, Valuation phase, Foundations phase, Development phase, and Operation phase.…”

“…ICM covers the full system development life cycle consisting of the Exploration phase, Valuation phase, Foundations phase, Development phase, and Operation phase. ICM has been evaluated to be a flexible but robust framework for system development [2]. The core concepts of the ICM include 1) commitment and accountability of system stakeholders, 2) success-critical stakeholder satisficing, 3) incremental growth of system definition and stakeholder commitment, 4) concurrent engineering, 5) iterative development cycles, and 6) risk-based activity levels and milestones.…”

“…Comparing with Agile methods [3], ICM embraces adaptability to unexpected change and at the same time allows scalability. In [2], it shows how the ICM can be applied to a broad spectrum of software-intensive systems processes, which are categorized into 12 process patterns as follows: Use Single NDI, Agile, Architected Agile, Formal Methods, Hardware with embedded Software component, Indivisible Initial Operational Capability, NDI-intensive, Hybrid agile/ plan-driven system, Multiowner system of systems, Family of systems, Brownfield, and Services-Intensive.…”

“…For the small e-services projects developed in our project course, four of the 12 process patterns of the ICM [15] predominate:…”

“…To quickly select and follow the appropriate process pattern helps the development to finish the project faster and more efficiently. Overall characteristics of each process pattern and the ICM decision points have been defined on a general-experience basis [2] but process guidelines and process selection decision criteria are lacking on the ability to help produce a viable process decision early in the life cycle.…”