1. Management Discussion Items
We need to discuss both the configuration management and the testing requirements as well as the resources required to complete these tasks. We need to decide the scope of configuration control. A CM Plan and revision cycle should be the next step. With regard to testing, the U.S. believes testing options should be re-evaluated, such as considering IV&V or industry request for comment (AFEI, NDIA, etc.). What are the thoughts on submission of the baseline to ISO? If the testing task is beyond the current capabilities of the IDEAS Group then it should be deleted as a Group requirement and left to member nations to implement as they see fit.
The next IDEAS meeting would normally be held in conjunction with the DoD EA conference; next year the conference will be held 1-5 Jun 09 in St. Louis which gives us a 9 month break. What is the members’ desire and is the extra TDY time and cost affordable for a meeting in Apr 09? Can we maintain sufficient progress with the telephone conferences alone or, to maintain progress, do we need to continue both the bi-monthly teleconferences and the 6 month IDEAS Group meetings? We favor only telephone conferences and to shorten the gap we will host the meeting in St. Louis the week before the Jun 09 DoD EA Conference
After we review progress and establish where we are in the program we again need to discuss and finalize the path forward. A completion date needs to be established - even if it's the date for a 0.9 release. We need to move to the next level and get the IV&V, industry reviews, testing, and CM underway. DoD is not in a position to continue development beyond the 2nd QTR of FY2009; our suggested June meeting before the EA Conference should be the turning point for the IDEAS Group - DoD is ramping down support following the current meeting with the expectation that the activities in #1 above will become the focus vs. modeling - we will continue to support those activities through monitoring.
The scope of the IDEAS Group should evolve to become an international interchange forum for the sharing of architecture descriptions. The work completed to date should be operationalized in support of our coalition warfighting missions.