An Alternative to Technology Readiness Levels for Non-Developmental Item (NDI) Software

Within the Department of Defense, Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) are increasingly used as a tool in assessing program risk. While there is considerable evidence to support the utility of using TRLs as part of an overall risk assessment, some characteristics of TRLs limit their applicability to software products, especially Non-Developmental Item (NDI) software including Commercial-Off-The-Shelf, Government-Off-The-Shelf, and Open Source Software. These limitations take four principle forms: 1) "blurring-together" various aspects of NDI technology/product readiness; 2) the absence of some important readiness attributes; 3) NDI product "decay;" and 4) no recognition of the temporal nature of system development and acquisition context. This paper briefly explores these issues, and describes an alternate methodology which combines the desirable aspects of TRLs with additional readiness attributes, and defines an evaluation framework which is easily understandable, extensible, and applicable across the full spectrum of NDI software.