Navy officials compounded all those problems by committing one of the major deadly acquisition sins: starting production before completing the design. The practice of concurrency, the official term for the overlap of development and production, has been described by one former Pentagon acquisition chief as “malpractice.” Building a ship, tank, or aircraft before the constituent technology has been proven through testing all but guarantees the program will go over budget and fall behind schedule, yet it happens all the time.

That’s funny. I thought “iterative design” was an ingenious idea. (/s)