“Which national forest laid down its life for this one?” asks Sergeant First Class Fanning (Viola Davis) poetically. Sounds like a case of vague requirements. Standardization and consistency are two of the most important qualities to consider when writing a requirements document. But the reason Burton’s doing things this way isn’t his personal preference for flashiness. Major General Partridge tries to explain this disastrous outcome away, of course. Incorrect framing of the problem. It’s important to include several groups. From the first absurd moments of The Pentagon Wars, we immediately understand that this is a story about a project gone horribly wrong. The lieutenant colonel is attempting a workaround for a problem that stemmed from poor requirements engineering choices. For fifteen years I taught IT system acquisition at National Defense University for the Department of Defense, to senior uniformed and civilian leadership. You definitely want to avoid endless rounds of haphazard permanent marker scratch-outs. During a particularly hilarious flashback of how the BFV developed over several decades, we learn a bit about the personality clashes and one-upmanship that yielded the cluttered and ineffective fighting vehicle that exists in the movie’s present. An honest Air Force officer tries to expose a case of government spending gone mad in this satirical comedy. It bears repeating: Always account for exceptions, deviations, and unexpected scenarios when writing requirements. With all the "suggestion", "modifications", "additions" and such on his project, he said what he is going through reminded him of this movie. To say that those are terrible odds for a piece of American combat equipment may be the understatement of the year. Study after study tells us the same truth: As you move further along in a project’s life cycle, the cost of fixing engineering errors in systems and software increases exponentially. Oh yeah, the missile works great! Instead, you can list them out in highly specific non-functional requirements at the outset of the program. After some spirited horse-trading, they send an order to the poor designers to add all of those things. Kelsey Grammer, Cary Elwes... get ready to laugh. In the opening scene of The Pentagon Wars, we’re thrown right into the urgency of a crisis: Major General Partridge is being grilled during a Congressional hearing. The Pentagon Wars is a 1998 HBO comedy film directed by Richard Benjamin and based on the book The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge … Don’t forget to loop in the testers who will be handling compliance verification. Complete: Precisely defines the system’s responses to all real-world situations the system will encounter, Consistent: Does not contain conflicts between requirements statements, Correct: Accurately identifies the conditions of all situations the system will encounter and precisely defines the system’s response to them, Modifiable: Has a logical structuring with related concerns grouped together, Ranked: Organizes the specification statements by importance and/or stability (which may conflict with the document’s modifiability), Traceable: Identifies each requirement uniquely, Unambiguous: States all requirements in such a manner that each can only be interpreted in one way, Valid: All project participants can understand, analyze, accept, or approve it, Verifiable: Must be consistent with related specifications at other (higher and lower) levels of abstraction, QRA Corp receives funding from the Government of Canada for Natural Language Processing R&D, How the Royal Canadian Air Force is Reducing Requirements Review Time by Over 50% with QVscribe, QRA Corp Announces US$3 Million in Financing, The Art of Design Inputs and Design Outputs, Automating the INCOSE Guide for Writing Requirements. Released February 28th, 1998, 'The Pentagon Wars' stars Kelsey Grammer, Cary Elwes, Viola Davis, John C. McGinley The R movie has a runtime of about 1 … The message is clear. It’s also one of the strongest arguments for why it’s so important to include rationale statements in your requirements document. The Pentagon Wars reminds us that even when everything feels distant and theoretical — the stakes are high when you’re a requirements engineer. Col Burton was appointed by Congress as an outsider to oversee the testing of new weapons in development, including the Bradley.… It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness. No good decisions come from that mindset. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. That’s the way things are done around here.”. For an easy way to do so, download our handy Guide & Checklist, which offers a quick summary of all 21 tips, as well as a compliance checklist. More importantly, all the decisions that went into the requirements document regarding the safety of the vehicle in combat were not designed with testability in mind. Thanks to compounded errors over time, users of the BFV faced a real survival threat, as the vehicle that was designed to protect them from enemy fire did nothing of the sort. Meanwhile, Lt. Col. Burton was forced to retire. When creating the requirements document, it’s important to think about whether the component will interface with third-party supplier systems. A well-acted performances, yet hard to believe subject. When the aluminum exterior was hit by a shell, it burned and gave off a toxic gas. Since most requirements documents are written in natural language, these ultimately meaningless terms can easily slip into the text. From the nonfiction book by … In other words: requirements document failures lead to project execution mishap whack-a-mole. The speed of the service was brilliant thanks to all. One clear lesson we can learn from The Pentagon Wars involves foresight. Awards & Events. Want to complete your own engineering projects without all the heartache, delays, and cost overruns? Let’s just say — that country isn’t exactly known for the potency of its artillery. For all its strengths, the organization is sometimes riddled with cronyism, red tape, and a pervasive rat race toward promotions and pensions. As we follow the time-jump narrative of The Pentagon Wars, we start to wonder one thing: How could so many competent army officials come to the same seemingly ridiculous conclusion about the efficacy of the BFV? Aim for clarity and ease of indexing; never let murkiness and unnecessary esoterica invade your requirements document. It’s tricked out with “the most sophisticated surveillance equipment,” as well as a rapid-fire cannon, an anti-tank rocket launcher with 1,500 shells and 10 tow anti-tank missiles. Movies. In a vacuum, the first iteration of the BFV was a smashing success. I think I bought almost ten copies and left them in various DOD sites all over the DOD world. Nevertheless, the design worked great! And don’t forget the ammunition that’s been emptied out and filled with sand. When he’s asked about the paveway bomb — a spectacularly inaccurate piece of weaponry — he’s forced to admit that “it missed by a mean distance of 5 miles, and nearly 60 percent of the time.”. By this point in development — and in line with a theme for the movie — it’s too late to overhaul the requirements in the way that they really ought to be. So, not a comedy, but a movie that is almost scarily faithful to the reality of DoD procurement. Over 17 years and almost as many billion dollars have gone into devising the B.F.V. In a sobering scene near the middle of The Pentagon Wars, we learn that every single official who was appointed to oversee new weapons testing prior to USAF Lieutenant Colonel James Burton failed to give his true opinion due to politics and fear of missing out on a promotion. Teachable moment: Go beyond expected events and behavior. The Pentagon Wars is available to watch, stream, download and buy on demand at HBO Max, Amazon, Google Play, Apple TV … Watch The Pentagon Wars movie trailer and get the latest cast info, photos, movie review and more on TVGuide.com. Men who held Lt. Col. Burton’s position before him were constantly rewarded for pushing paper. We begin to gather that this MacGyver-like jury rigging was a matter of necessity. The Pentagon Wars (751) 7.3 1 h 43 min 1998 R [HBO] HD. Quick! Resist the trap! For many projects, the requirements documents are indeed that serious — poorly organized, hard-to-understand specifications can lead to great cost, huge headaches, and critical failures. Go on — hop inside this armored vehicle. The result? Good rule of thumb: If you don’t want to run tests on your product out of fear that the test itself will annihilate your product … you need to re-examine your requirements. Earlier in the film, we already saw a visual representation of the “kill them with paper cuts” approach to documenting the BFV’s development. Such words seem, on their surface, to lend an easy flow and accessibility to the document. Vagueness slips into requirements documents for a variety of reasons. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Tense chase … and a great cast ( check out Viola Davis as Cary Elwe s. 17 years and almost as many billion dollars have gone out the window should... 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