Acquiring Innovative Software Systems: Experiences from the Field

Managing acquisition of software projects, containing innovative components, brings many challenges to acquirer organizations. Innovative software projects usually have unclear requirements and scope. They require stakeholders such as research institutes, software development organizations and the domain experts who work together and need a flexible budget and time frame to be successful. As a result, the acquisition management activities such as estimation of the product size and the required development effort, acquisition planning and control, determining proper structures for the management of organizations, and requirements management require unique approaches. In this study, experience gained from the acquisition of an innovative military software development project is presented.