Welcome to the Requirements Document Wizard (RDW)!

You are working on a Capability Needs Statement (CNS) relevant to the October 2020 version of DoDI 5000.87 (OPERATION OF THE SOFTWARE ACQUISITION PATHWAY).

• Per the Instruction, a CNS is, “a high-level capture of mission deficiencies, or enhancements to existing operational capabilities, features, interoperability needs, legacy interfaces and other attributes that provides enough information to define various software solutions as they relate to the overall threat environment.”

• All Capability Requirements detailed in this document should be prioritized to effectively guide the software development.

• A CNS is just one of the artifacts that the Decision Authority will need to decide whether a program is ready to enter into the execution phase. Other relevant documents include, but are not limited to, the user agreement (UA), acquisition strategy, test strategy, and cost estimate.

• There is 5-10 page limit constraint on this document, as well as a 1-page constraint on the Executive Summary section.

General guidance on using the RDW includes:

• The sections and sub-sections in the RDW are laid out sequentially according to the elements that the governing manual or instruction requires within your document.

• Most are MANDATORY and will show an error in RED FONT if you do not address them.

• If you don’t believe a mandatory element is applicable to your document, simply enter, “XXX is not applicable because….,” or similar verbiage.

• If you choose to address a mandatory required element within another sub-section (perhaps in conjunction with another element), you may skip over (leave blank) these mandatory sections, just bypass the error messaging. Just make sure you address each requirement somewhere in the relevant section.

• Some sub-sections are marked “Optional.” These can be skipped (left blank) without showing an error. HOWEVER, if the element is applicable to your document, ensure to address it SOMEWHERE in your document.

• You are able to use rich text (e.g. bold, italicize, underline, red or black font, etc.) within many of the writing sections (not all). Some simple entries are constrained to plain text. If you want to use bold, underline, etc., you can make the changes once you pass the template contents to MS Word.

• If you choose to cut and paste text from another source, make sure you convert it to the font you are using throughout the document. The RDW defaults to the fonts of:

1. Times New Roman, Regular, and size 12 for most text and text boxes; and,

2. Arial, Regular, and size 10, for all tables.

• Please refer to the "RDW post-export to MS Word Actions" section of the Desk Reference, available through the website (https://content1.dau.edu/rdw) for additional formatting required to be performed once you've exported your RDW Document to MS Word