I believe there is still cause for concern about the system development, and I am glad that the Transport Subcommittee is keeping this topic in view. Although I believe that the role of formal acceptance tests has been misunderstood or misused by participants in the public discussion, and the chosen methods of review have not led me to alter my basic technical concerns expressed to you a year ago, I should like to confine myself here to offering the subcommittee a few thoughts about the costs of the NERC software development, based on events of the past year and other evidence presented to you. Such a model sets a formal contract milestone as a point of reference, and attempts to assign the proportions of resources that will be used each side of this fixed point. I shall use the milestone of formal acceptance, which occurred during April and May, 1998. First I should note that the date of acceptance testing is used only as a formal boundary in the fixed proportion model.
Nothing is implied about the quality or state of the product at the time of formal acceptance.
I don't necessarily concur with these assertions, as you will infer from my previous evidence before the Subcommittee, but that is not my topic here. The NERC software was in development for 5.5 years up to formal acceptance. This compares with the 4 years planned and bid. I think this could be misleading. Money is being used to represent resources, and it is important to know how many resources have actually been used in forward development, not just how many resources have been paid for by this point.