Test Technology Development, Military Standards I

The Military Standards Phase I methodology project was established to investigate the disparities observed during the evaluation of draft technical manuals DTMs at USAEPG. The objective of the investigation was to develop a concise and effective method with which to prepare and evaluate technical publications within TECOM and the Army. It was found that the numerous standards available to prepare DTMs contain repetitive requirements. These requirements were found to be either exactly the same or titled the same but contained differing negating instructions. The investigation collected and categorized these deficiencies to substantiate the recommendation to revise present DTM preparation and evaluation processes. The final analysis documents the need to not only standardize the specifications but to eliminate manual methods of evaluating DTM requirements such as grammar, format, style, and readability, replacing this with the commercial off-the-shelf software programs. In addition, it is recommended that an expert systemprocess be investigated in the second phase of this project to eliminate skewed evaluation results and assist the preparers of DTM contracts and manuals at the development stage. The hope is that this method will eliminate shortfalls with a primary resource technical publication of a system and prevent operational mission failures