The Defense Department’s developmental test community is encouraging more rigorous testing standards so as to create better and more operationally relevant data to hopefully reduce the cost and effort put into operational testing later in the acquisition process.
At the National Defense Industrial Association’s annual test and evaluation conference on Wednesday, David Brown, deputy assistant secretary of defense for developmental test and evaluation, said he has required program managers to start including a “developmental evaluation framework” in their test and evaluation master plans (TEMPs).
Brown told Defense Daily afterward that the framework includes information that has always been required in a TEMP, but it ensures that all programs create a similar format for their plans that can be more easily checked for its robustness, and it forces program managers to consider not just what tests they need to conduct but also what knowledge they hope to gain from those tests.
In doing so, “we now have the mission context for everything in that developmental evaluation framework,” he said.
Brown joked during his presentation that if he implemented this change successfully he’d eliminate the need for his counterpart on the operational test and evaluation side, J. Michael Gilmore.
The need for operational assessments will never go away, he conceded, but “if we have used this developmental evaluation framework and we’ve got all this mission context stuff, right? And we had it right from the bench all the way up, then we ought to have an awful lot of data there in the mission context. So Dr. Gilmore won’t have to do an operational test to get the information for an operational assessment, he ought to have really good developmental test data in a mission context that ought to support an operational assessment.”
After his speech, Brown said that he’s had “rousing success” with 10 program offices since implementing the developmental evaluation framework, and only one office has pushed back against it.