Agile for Government Summit

The purpose of this event is to foster better understanding of how agile software development methods are providing the basis for incremental and modular acquisition across Government, and to discuss the changing technology of modern information-intensive businesses and the implications these have for evolving Government approaches to streamlining IT.

This Summit is a partnership between the AFEI ADAPT and the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute.

Background: Many Government agencies and programs are implementing agile software development techniques across a wide range of application domains. 

The Whitehouse Digital Government Strategy outlines initiatives to improve IT services to customers.  These include the use of modular approaches or IT development and acquisition. 

Business on the Internet: Today business is done on the Internet.  On-line businesses are supplanting brick and mortar, and every industry uses the Internet as an information collection and distribution platform.  As technology continues to rapidly evolve new strategies are being employed that increasingly move organizations to Internet-based cloud, federated and shared-services architectures. 

Modern IT operations feature streamlined processes for development and deployment of mission critical systems that information-intensive businesses rely on. 

Government, through open data initiatives, infrastructure consolidation and standardization, more efficient use of technology, streamlined acquisition, and enterprise-level capabilities is beginning to adopt commercial practices in delivering value to its customers.

Agile methods have become a mainstay of best practice in private sector businesses that rely heavily on technology to serve their customers.  Within Government their application can at times be hindered.  As modern IT for information technology-intensive businesses evolves Government is seeking new ways to improve how technology is applied to improve information delivery to its “customers”.  These include not just agile software development, but the concepts of agile program management, technical debt, and IT Development-Operations (DevOps).