At the Initial Operational Capability Milestone, the product is ready to be handed over to the Transition Team. All functionality has been developed and all alpha testing (if any) has been completed. In addition to the software, a user manual has been developed, and there is a description of the current release.

Evaluation Criteria

The evaluation criteria for the construction phase involve the answers to these questions:

• Is this product release stable and mature enough to be deployed in the user community?
• Are all the stakeholders ready for the transition into the user community?
• Are actual resource expenditures versus planned still acceptable?

Transition may have to be postponed by one release if the project fails to reach this milestone.

Artifacts

Essential Artifacts (in order of importance)	State at milestone
"The System"	The executable system itself, ready to begin "beta" testing.
Deployment Plan	Initial version developed, reviewed and baselined. On smaller projects, this may be embedded in the Software Development Plan.
Implementation Model (and all constituent artifacts, including Implementation Elements)	Expanded from that created during the elaboration phase; all implementation elements created by the end of the construction phase.
Test Suite ("smoke test")	Tests implemented and executed to validate the stability of the build for each executable releases created during the construction phase.
User Support Material	User Manuals and other training materials. Preliminary draft, based on use cases.  May be needed if the system has a strong user interface aspect.
Iteration Plan	Iteration plan for the transition phase completed and reviewed.
Design Model (and all constituent artifacts)	Updated with new design elements identified during the completion of all requirements.
Development Process	The development process, including the development case and any project-specific guidelines and templates, has been refined based on project experience, and is sufficiently defined for the next phase to proceed.
Development Infrastructure	The development environment for transition is in place, including all tools and automation support for the process.
Data Model	Updated with all elements needed to support the persistence implementation (e.g. tables, indexes, object-to-relational mappings, etc.)
Optional Artifacts	State at milestone
Supplementary Specifications	Updated with new requirements (if any) discovered during the construction phase.
Use-Case Model (Actors, Use Cases)	Updated with new use cases (if any) discovered during the construction phase.