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substantiated requires significant efforts on the part of the project develop-
ment team.
• Optional requirements: if optional requirements were part of the SOW and
the requirements spec, these must be evaluated as to cost, time required, and
overall benefit to the project.

The purchaser should avoid overspecifying the system, but understand that if
you do not specify something, you will get the default COTS capability in that
area. For instance, if you state that the “system SHALL provide a latent case
management system,” you cannot then fail the vendor at acceptance test time
when the latent case system turns out to be more basic and limited than you
had imagined. The alternative is to include a rated requirement for a latent
case management system (LCMS), add a proposal preparation requirement
that the vendors submit their COTS LCMS documentation, and then rate the
depth and quality of that documentation.
As previously noted, requirements specs must be clear, complete, and unam-
biguous. To ensure that they meet all of these requirements, it is useful if
the document itself is highly structured and formatted to incorporate the
following:

• A list of assumptions that have been made by the project development team
in preparing the requirements specification.
• A list of compliance standards that must be met by the vendors, e.g., national
or local requirements for electrical standards, image compression and trans-
mission, etc.
• A description of the expected users of the system.
• Requirements that must be met by the vendor should be contained in sepa-
rate SHALL statements. For example: “The card scan workflow SHALL
permit an operator to adjust the contrast/brightness of a fingerprint image
during the quality control process.”
• Each requirement, and each informational statement, should be individually
numbered to allow the proposal reviewers to track compliance with each of
the requirements.

7.6 DEVELOPMENT AND DEPLOYMENT PHASE
For the development and deployment phase, the basic questions in our deci-
sion tree include the following:

• How well is the vendor performing the SOW tasks?
• Are they on schedule?
• Do they understand the nuances of your needs?