Find out what the AFIT STAT Center of Excellence is all about
The Office of the Secretary of Defense Scientific Test and Analysis Techniques Center of Excellence (OSD STAT COE) was established in 2012 to assist DoD programs with developing rigorous test plans to improve the outcomes of defense acquisition. Utilizing a combination of rigorous scientific methods and lessons learned, the COE determines where test designs can be improved and efficiencies gained, and then applies this knowledge to the program's test and evaluation strategy development.
Find out what the AFIT STAT Center of Excellence is all about
Find out what the AFIT STAT Center of Excellence is all about - 232 Aug 2019
The Office of the Secretary of Defense Scientific Test and Analysis Techniques Center of Excellence (OSD STAT COE) was established in 2012 to assist DoD programs with developing rigorous test plans to improve the outcomes of defense acquisition. Utilizing a combination of rigorous scientific methods and lessons learned, the COE determines where test designs can be improved and efficiencies gained, and then applies this knowledge to the program's test and evaluation strategy development.
Video Transcript
The deputy assistant secretary of defense for Developmental Test & Evaluation decided he wanted to create the center of excellence here at AFIT.
AFIT provides a really unique strategic position. We house and develop best practices, we train the workforce and we truly employ the best and the brightest in developmental test.
Acquisition decisions have to be made on data. Stat is scientific tests and analysis techniques and it is the most efficient and effective way to select test points that will support decision making for testers and program managers.
Whether they be Air Force programs Navy programs Army programs we cover the full DoD gamut and in fact the Department of Homeland Security.
We reduce the risk that a weapon system will fail by injecting science.
We have a working document in which we list all performance measures all our brainstorming ideas and then based off of that we didn't build a test design.
So a test design essentially is a set of test points and each test point has a set of conditions
And in the end they have to know that it meets its requirements - is it going to do for the users what it's supposed to do so the decision makers can take that risk into account do they avoid the risk do they mitigate it or do they accept it.
A lot of times each test is expensive so the budget for a test how many runs can you afford to do - every one of those runs where you're changing something it costs money we want to find an efficient test that's still effective.
Measuring success is an interesting question - seven programs had come back and have shown us how we've saved them over 158 million dollars just with those seven programs over the first three years of our existence.
We were introduced to the Stat COE in June of 2017 to help us resolve a series of physiologic events on the F-35 aircraft reported by pilots - they helped us to identify key parameters and issues that we could test in lab and we saved around six months of time easily and also around a million - million and a half dollars of test dollars and flight tests we plan on working with them in the future as we continue to test and make the F-35 life-support system better.
