On the Use of Architectural Products for Cost Estimation

The Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) provides a standard set of views that illustrate specific attributes of a system. These views give different levels of detail and purpose that allow engineers to express operational, system, technical, and architectural properties for specific purposes. The twenty six different views available can be useful and at the same time overwhelming to someone unfamiliar with the framework. An increasing number of defense contractors are using DoDAF to characterize system attributes. These same contractors are responsible for providing cost estimates for the development and implementation of systems. This paper provides the link between these two areas by relating architectural views to system representation for cost estimation. There are several benefits to this link. First, the cost estimation community can benefit from a deeper understanding of the DoDAF and its objectives to improve the field of cost estimation through the development of models that better represent system architectures. Second, DoDAF can serve as a common language between customers and contractors by improving the representation of stakeholder needs and objectives. Third, the architecting community can benefit from the identification of subjective cost drivers currently not addressed in the DoDAF products. In this spirit, this paper describes how DoDAF architecture frameworks can be used to determine functional system size for adequate estimating of systems engineering effort. This is illustrated through the use of the OilCo FastPass system defined in previous work. The utility of using the FastPass system is that it is well documented in journal articles and it is a system familiar to the general systems engineering audience.