The evolutionary acquisition strategy has been promulgated by the forthcoming DoD Instruction 5000.2. It introduces innovations throughout the acquisition cycle: before a contract is considered, technology readiness guides the choice of experiments; contracts are let for one or more blocks; and progress within each block is managed with spiral development. There is some confusion as to the nature of evolutionary acquisition and spiral development and their relationship. To address these problems, a workshop was held September 13-15, 2000, under joint sponsorship of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Science and Technology, the Software Engineering Institute, and the Center for Software Engineering. This report summarizes the workshop and presents its recommendations. The workshop concentrated on the application of spiral development within the context of evolutionary acquisition by asking the question" How can federal organizations use both to improve the overall acquisition process?" Sessions were organized around the following key issues:

• canonical definition of evolutionary acquisition• successful strategies for evolutionary acquisition• the mapping between spiral development and evolutionary acquisition

• institutional barriers to evolutionary acquisition and spiral development

• practical steps necessary to operationalize spiral development and evolutionary acquisition.