Concept: Systems Engineering - Initial Operational Capability Milestone
This guideline discusses the evaluation criteria for the Initial Operational Capability Milestone at the end of the construction phase. The state of the essential artifacts is also described for a Systems Engineering project.
Main Description

At the Initial Operational Capability Milestone, the product is ready to be handed over to the Transition Team. All functionality has been developed, and all alpha testing (if any) has been completed. In addition to the system itself, user materials and product release descriptions have been developed.

Evaluation Criteria

The evaluation criteria for the construction phase involve the answers to these questions:

  • Is this product release stable and mature enough to be deployed in the user community?
  • Are all the stakeholders ready for the transition into the user community?
  • Are actual resource expenditures versus planned still acceptable?

Transition may have to be postponed for another iteration, if the project fails to satisfy these criteria.

Artifacts

Essential Artifacts State at Milestone
"The System" The working system itself, ready to begin "beta" testing.
 Deployment Plan Initial version developed, reviewed and baselined. On smaller projects, this may be embedded in the Software Development Plan / System Development Plan.

System Deployment Model

Final technology choices have been made, and the implementation model is stabilized.

Implementation Model (and all constituent artifacts, including Implementation Element)
[software development]
Expanded from that created during the Elaboration Phase; all components created by the end of the Construction phase.
Test Suite ("smoke test")
[software development]
Tests implemented and executed to validate the stability of the build for each executable release created during the construction phase.
 User Support Material User manuals and other training materials. Preliminary draft, based on use cases. May be needed if the system has a strong user interface aspect, or if there are other operational complexities.
Iteration Plan Iteration plan for the initial iteration of the Transition Phase completed and reviewed.
Design Model / System Design Model Updated with new design elements identified during the completion of all requirements.
 Development Case Refined based on early project experience. The development environment, including the process, tools, and automation support required to support the transition team will have been put in place.
 Tools The tools used to support the work in Transition are installed.
Data Model
[software development]
Updated with all elements needed to support the persistence implementation (for example, tables, indexes, object-to-relational mappings, and so forth).
Optional Artifacts State at Milestone
Supplementary Specifications Updated with new requirements (if any) discovered during the construction phase.
Use-Case Model  Updated with new use cases (if any) discovered during the construction phase.

Subsystem Supplementary Requirements  

This is a subsystem-level artifact as viewed from the system level-updated, if necessary, in the Construction Phase.

Subsystem Use-Case Model



This is a subsystem-level artifact as viewed from the system level-updated, if necessary, in the Construction Phase.