Tagline: 65% of defense software is in the sustainment danger zone. Here's how to find it before it owns your O&M budget.

Abstract:
Software O&M costs are the fastest-growing line item in the defense budget, and most of those costs were locked in years before the system ever reached the field. The root cause is code delivered to a standard no one measured, accumulated maintainability debt no one tracked, and a handoff to a sustainment organization inheriting a problem no one disclosed.
This talk presents an analysis of millions of lines of open-source defense sector code across dozens of projects and 200 developers, scored against an 8-factor, research-validated maintainability framework. The finding: 65% of that code sits in the sustainment danger zone, the range where personnel turnover, technology refresh, and future modification requirements will produce costs that exceed the value of the system.

That number was entirely invisible before the analysis. No existing contractor deliverable, CDRL, or DCSA inspection would have surfaced it.

This session introduces the Sustainment Intelligence framework, a pre-delivery scoring approach that helps defense software programs evaluate whether contractor-delivered code is ready to transition from development into long-term sustainment. Instead of treating the handoff as an act of institutional hope, the framework turns transition readiness into a documented, defensible risk assessment.

Attendees will understand how this scoring methodology differs from commercial code quality tools like SonarQube, why that distinction matters for defense acquisition, and how program offices across the services can embed transition readiness gates into their program structure before another software effort enters sustainment with hidden technical debt, weak maintainability, and unresolved contractor dependency.

Learning Objectives
• Understand the relationship between codebase growth, cognitive complexity, and sustainment cost, and why complexity compounds faster than most acquisition leaders expect
• Distinguish between developer-facing code quality tools and PMO-facing sustainment risk tools, and understand why conflating the two leaves a critical oversight gap
• Apply the 8-factor maintainability scoring model to evaluate contractor-delivered software before accepting delivery or transitioning to a sustainment organization
• Identify the specific contract clauses, CDRLs, and acceptance test procedures where sustainment risk scoring can be embedded with minimal acquisition reform
• Understand how AFRL's transition quality gate model can serve as a template for program offices seeking to institutionalize sustainment-ready design across the portfolio

Target audience:
Program Managers, Deputy Program Managers, PEO staff, acquisition leaders, technical directors, contracting officers, systems engineers, software factory leaders, sustainment leaders, and defense industry executives.

Preferred Session Duration:
50 mins including Q&A