DHS shifting to cloud, agile development to boost homeland security

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Patrick Thibodeau.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has moved to agile development and is shifting to cloud platforms in an effort to improve its IT operations. At a hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday, a DHS IT official gave lawmakers an overview of agile development methodologies, one of the tools that the department is using to fix its IT project management.

Agile came up after U.S. Rep Ron Barber (D-Ariz.), a former staffer in Rep. Gabrielle Gifford’s office who won that seat after Giffords resigned, asked what DHS was doing to ensure that its IT systems met user needs. Margaret Graves, DHS deputy CIO, said the department is using agile methodologies to create user stories to help shape the systems. In agile development, user stories can be short and informal descriptions of some of the functions users would like to see…

"These users are developing along with the developers," said Graves. "They are sitting with the developer, they are talking through use cases, they are testing at appropriate times," she said. What this is accomplishing is providing immediate feedback, "which is continuously incorporated into the development cycle," said Graves…

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