DOD-STD-2167A (

Department of Defense Department of Defence or Department of Defense may refer to: Current departments of defence * Department of Defence (Australia) * Department of National Defence (Canada) * Department of Defence (Ireland) * Department of National Defense (Philipp ...

Standard 2167A), titled "Defense Systems Software Development", was a United States

defense standard A United States defense standard, often called a military standard, "MIL-STD", "MIL-SPEC", or (informally) "MilSpecs", is used to help achieve standardization objectives by the U.S. Department of Defense. Standardization is beneficial in achievi ...

, published on February 29, 1988, which updated the less well known

DOD-STD-2167 The terms "DOD-STD-2167" and "DOD-STD-2168" (often mistakenly referred to as "MIL-STD-2167" and "MIL-STD-2168" respectively) are the official specification numbers for superseded U.S. DoD military standards describing documents and procedures req ...

published 4 June 1985. This document established "uniform requirements for the software development that are applicable throughout the system life cycle." This revision was written to allow the contractor more flexibility and was a significant reorganization and reduction of the previous revision; ''e.g..'', where the previous revision prescribed pages of design and coding standards, this revision only gave one page of general requirements for the contractor's coding standards; while DOD-STD-2167 listed 11 quality factors to be addressed for each software component in the SRS, DOD-STD-2167A only tasked the contractor to address relevant quality factors in the SRS. Like DOD-STD-2167, it was designed to be used with DOD-STD-2168, "Defense System Software Quality Program". On December 5, 1994 it was superseded by

MIL-STD-498 MIL-STD-498, ''Military Standard Software Development and Documentation'', was a United States military standard whose purpose was to "establish uniform requirements for software development and documentation." It was released Nov. 8, 1994, and r ...

, which merged DOD-STD-2167A, DOD-STD-7935A, and DOD-STD-2168 into a single document, and addressed some vendor criticisms.

Criticism

One criticism of the standard was that it was biased toward the

Waterfall Model The waterfall model is a breakdown of project activities into linear sequential phases, meaning they are passed down onto each other, where each phase depends on the deliverables of the previous one and corresponds to a specialization of tasks. ...

. Although the document states "the contractor is responsible for selecting software development methods (for example, rapid prototyping)", it also required "formal reviews and audits" that seemed to lock the vendor into designing and documenting the system before any implementation began. Another criticism was the focus on design documents, to the exclusion of

Computer-Aided Software Engineering Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) is the domain of software tools used to design and implement applications. CASE tools are similar to and were partly inspired by Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools used for designing hardware products. CAS ...

(CASE) tools being used in the industry. Vendors would often use the CASE tools to design the software, then write several standards-required documents to describe the CASE-formatted data. This created problems matching design documents to the actual product.

Successors

One result of these criticisms was to begin designing a successor standard, which became

. Another result was a preference for formal industry-designed standards (such as

IEEE 12207 ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 ''Systems and software engineering – Software life cycle processes'' is an international standard for software lifecycle processes. First introduced in 1995, it aims to be a primary standard that defines all the processes requi ...

) and informal "

best practice A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to other known alternatives because it often produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing ...

" specifications, rather than trying to determine the best processes and making them formal requirements on suppliers. MIL-STD-2167A with MIL-STD-498 eventually became the basis for DO-178 in the early 1980s, with DO-178 receiving subsequent subsequent revisions. MIL-STD-2167 and MIL-STD-498 together define standard software development life cycle processes that are expected to be implemented and followed as well as prescriptively defining standard document format and content. In contrast, the less proscriptive DO-178B/C defines objectives that should be accomplished as ''acceptable means'' of demonstrating airworthiness, permitting relative flexibility in the life cycles and processes employed to accomplish those objectives.

References

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External links

The DOD-STD-2167 standard

The DOD-STD-2167A standard

MIL-HDBK-287 A Tailoring Guide for DOD-STD-2167A

Military perspective on replacing DOD-STD-2167A with MIL-STD-498

Military statement together with DOD-STD-2167A with FAM-DRE-231
United States Department of Defense standards 1988 documents Software development