DOD-STD-2167A

US defense standard for software development

DOD STD 2167A (Department of Defense Standard 2167A), titled "Defense Systems Software Development", was a United States defense standard, published on February 29, 1988, which updated the less well known DOD STD 2167 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 On December 5, 1994 it was superseded by MIL STD 498, which merged DOD STD 2167A, DOD STD 7935A, and DOD STD 2168 into a single document, and addressed some vendor criticisms.

One criticism of the standard was that it was biased toward the Waterfall Model. 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 (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.

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mistakenly referred to as "MIL STD 2167" and "MIL STD 2168" respectively) are the official specification numbers for superseded U. S. DoD military standards describing documents and procedures required for developing military computer systems. Specifically:

DOD STD 2167 described the necessary project documentation to be delivered when developing a "Mission Critical" computer software system. DOD STD 2168 was the DoD's software quality assurance standard, titled "Defense System Software Quality Program".

One result of these criticisms was to begin designing a successor standard, which became MIL STD 498. Another result was a preference for formal industry designed standards (such as IEEE 12207) and informal "best practice" 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 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.