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AFIS software engineering has been a challenged industry since its incep-
tion. Many AFIS are initially disappointments, and there are far more con-
tentious discussions about payments being withheld until systems work as
anticipated than the industry would care to admit. One lesson to be learned is
that there is more to purchasing an AFIS than picking the lowest price or the
best match rate in a limited test environment, also known as a benchmark.
The stories of failures and cost and schedule overruns in the systems devel-
opment and software engineering arenas are legendary. In the mid-1980s, the
U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) decided to study the issue to determine if
there was anything that separated the successful projects from the rest. Carnegie
Mellon University (CMU) was selected to perform the study. DOD established
a center of excellence at CMU, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), which
is still actively studying and reporting on this field.
The SEI demonstrated a clear correlation between the maturity of a busi-
ness’s processes and the quality of its products. They then modeled the levels
of maturity to enable government procurement and program offices and indus-
try to evaluate the maturity, and thus the likely success, of a development effort
undertaken by a corporate division or an entire company. This model is known
as the capability maturity model (CMM).
The CMM has five levels of maturity, levels 1 through 5. Very few companies
achieve level 5—or even aim for it. At the lowest level, level 1, there are few or
no defined processes, and any established processes are poorly documented
and not routinely followed. To move up from level 2 to level 5, it is not suffi-
cient to simply have policies; the policies must be written, disseminated, under-
stood, updated based on experience, and followed. Coupled with the CMM
elements, there are system engineering elements that play a role in success. The
most important relate to the requirements and the design phase of a project.
Standardized, quality-oriented software development based on mature
processes has been shown to reduce the time to delivery, the number of latent
defects, and the overall cost. More recently, the SEI published studies on the
procurement and integration of COTS systems. The major difference between
developing a new system from scratch and integrating one based on COTS is
that “the requirements process must become more flexible, yielding to the real-
1
ities of commercial products.” Later in this chapter, we will see how this should
be taken into consideration in the specification of requirements for procure-
ment of an AFIS.
A corollary to the SEI findings is that an agency or department purchasing
an AFIS needs well-defined processes of its own to ensure that they convey their
requirements clearly to their users and the vendor, that they manage the design

1 “COTS-Based System.” www.sei.cmu.edu.