reliability growth, the maturation of a system to achieve opti- mum reliability over its expected operating lifetime. Testing to the expected life of a system can identify “infant mortality,” or failures that occur very early in the life of a system and are associ- ated with design shortcomings; steady-state failures, which occur randomly following the infant mortality phase; and wear-out fail- ures, which come at the end of the life cycle.
CONCLUSION For AMPV, delays in contractor delivery significantly impacted the scheduled test execution. But because of the efforts of the T&E integrated product team in planning the contractor test- ing, the government was able to simply redesignate the executed contractor testing as government testing and saved several months of schedule, preventing a milestone slippage. Had this plan- ning and these actions not taken place, it was unlikely that the program would have maintained the planned milestone schedule.
Te bottom line is that use of contractor data to address test and evaluation requirements for acquisition programs is possible, but it will require cooperation and planning by the acquisition and T&E communities. Te T&E community needs more than an agreement about the testing and data. What is needed is an agreed-to process to resolve questions and answers such as in the accompanying example quickly and easily.
In such cases, the T&E community will have to face the real- ity that its test, although combined with that of a contractor to reduce redundancy, must actually expand in scope to deal with the problems identified. Contractor testing ends up adding things the contractor normally would not do, but the overall benefit is the potential to reduce government testing on the back end. Also, additional testing may be required to determine if a solution was addressed effectively. Tis acceptance is key when combined test- ing is necessary for the sake of overall test or schedule reductions and efficiency.
Lastly, the test community must recognize that a combined test may gather more information, with greater cost or scope, than either of the two individually planned tests, as it is collecting data for two agencies. Nonetheless, the test can still reduce overall redundancy and create efficiency compared with two completely separate tests.
With the constant goal of streamlined acquisition and exer- cising better buying power, the use of contractor testing, with appropriate organizational coordination and planning, is a best practice to adopt.
As the acquisition community strives to “shift left”― to accelerate acquisition
timelines―the use of data derived from contractor testing could be more efficient, save on testing costs and speed fielding of equipment.
For more information, contact the author at 443-861-9608 or DSN: 848-9608; or at
harry.h.jenkins2.civ@
mail.mil.
DISCLAIMER While this paper was coordinated with PEO GCS, the views expressed herein are solely those of the author, and do not neces- sarily reflect the views of PEO GCS, the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command or the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense.
MR. HARRY H. JENKINS III is an Army test and evaluation command systems chair for the Mounted Systems Evaluation Directorate of the Army Evaluation Center. He holds an M.S. in engineering management from the University of Maryland, Balti- more County, and a B.S. in engineering from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He has 26 years’ experience in acquisition, test and evaluation and is a member of the Army Acquisition Corps.
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