The Defense Science Board has released a report addressing the role of test and evaluation as a key component of a structured systems engineering process needed to develop military systems that could be used in complex environments.
The report, which was cleared by the Department of Defense for publication on Friday, provides five major findings and recommendations that call for a strategic shift in DOD’s approach to T&E.
Those recommendations include improving T&E efficiency using continuous threat engineering and assessment, enhancing system performance through continuous testing and improving T&E speed and efficiency of software intensive systems.
The document also cites four enablers to achieving the needed strategic shift in T&E: improving the use of digital engineering for T&E, ensuring a trained T&E workforce, modernizing the T&E infrastructure and refining the DOD organizational oversight of the T&E enterprise.
To advance the use of digital engineering for T&E, recommendations include publishing best practices on digital engineering principles to realize the opportunity for improving developmental testing speed and efficiency and educating program offices to be prepared to execute T&E functions using such principles.
