Community: Emerging Technologies

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TestForge

Forge.mil currently provides support for testing within the development cycle on agile projects. This includes support for defect management, automated unit, functional and regression testing and static code analysis via a continuous integration environment.

Moving forward, Forge.mil will provide full-support for all testing activities including Performance, Scalability, Reliability, Interoperability, Operational, Net-Ready KPP, and IA. The Forge.mil platform will leverage existing agency tools and capabilities in a fully-managed, cloud (RACE) environment. The test capability within Forge.mil will extend and compliment the other ALM services to enable successful acquisitions of enhanced capabilities for the warfighter.

The test capability in Forge.mil will allow the DoD Community to:

• Share information
• Improve risk management
• Eliminate duplication and reduce cost
• Conduct comprehensive, mission-focused test events, faster
• Ensure decision makers and users have all relevant information to better understand capabilities and limitations
• Quickly provision "production-like" nodes on the cloud to serve as the test environments
• Automatically deploy desired test tools from a catalog of integrated tools
• Connect to the team's Build Automation environment, ALM tool and SCM
• Deploy test-ready builds from Forge.mil onto on an on-demand basis
• Automatically deploy VNTB onto the cloud for Interoperability testing

CertificationForge

C&A activities ensure that each stakeholder in the IT development process is able to make an informed decision concerning risk and their liability. By standardizing certification criteria, developing and automating common evaluation methods, and creating a standard reporting format; the evaluation performed by one organization can be understood, trusted and fully leveraged by other organizations. When necessary, we can improve the dependability and trustworthiness of these evaluations by accrediting independent certifiers to perform these certifications.

Through this process, Forge.mil will minimize the need for each stakeholder to perform their own testing thus minimizing the time and expense associated with making a new or improved product or service available. In addition, providers will have a greater understanding of the requirements and information necessary to support their stakeholder's decisions and can improve their chance of successful fielding and adoption by ensuring these needs are addressed early in the development cycle. Forge.mil will enable collaboration and transparency for all stakeholders throughout the development and certification process.

The existing Path-to-Production capabilities are initially focused on the acceleration of the IA Certification and Accreditation process within the RACE cloud environment. Today, the Path-to-Production refers to the process that teams follow to promote completed features from environment to environment (development to test, from test to production) while taking advantage of the optimized C&A process. The process begins with you developing an application in Zone B (development), followed by the promotion of your application into Zone A (testing), and finally the migration of your application into a DECC production environment. The Path-to-Production can be logically separated into two phases: Phase I is the promotion of an application from the development zone into the test zone; Phase II is the promotion of the application into a production enclave located within a DECC.

The Path-to-Production reduces the total time required to obtain accreditation from 65 days to 10 days by streamlining approval workflows and leveraging inheritance from the cloud and Defense Enterprise Computing Center (DECC) environments. DISA's Path-to-Production will be available to customers who provision development servers in the Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE). The Path-to-Production also uses the Enterprise Mission Assurance Support Service (eMASS) and the Vulnerability Management System (VMS) tools to track the accreditation of systems.

StandardsForge

Setting and enforcing software development standards has always been a significant challenge primarily due to the variety of perspectives and the complexity in their terminology. The past decade has witnessed both the growth and maturity of a standards model that has been accepted by most DoD agencies and developers. In general, the objectives for these standards are:

• To establish and document a standardized and coherent methodology for the development activities;
• To provide a reference for common terminology, definition, and vocabulary for software development;
• To establish clear expectations between acquirer and developer; and
• To define applicability of the software to be developed as; newly developed, modified, reused, bought out, prepared to other standards, or procured off-the shelf.

Forge.mil is evolving a platform that integrates the use of existing GIG services in the development cycle and promotes the reuse of existing software while enabling the self-synchronization of DoD IT development projects and programs. The Forge.mil platform is evolving to integrate tools that enable the collaborative development and implementation of DoD IT and data standards. These tools include the DoD Metadata registry (MDR) and the DoD IT Standards Registry to provide a one-stop shop for the technology development community.

DoD Enterprise Tools Initiative

The DoD CIO Enterprise Tools Initiative is an effort under the direction of the Enterprise Guidance Board (EGB) to promote the adoption and on-going enhancement of software that is of particular value to the DoD Enterprise. Supporting open source and DoD community source development efforts, the DoD Enterprise Tools Initiative is designed to maximize the value of software development efforts occurring within the DoD community that may be of significant value to others within the DoD Enterprise. The effort is designed to help promote adoption of potentially useful tools and build diverse developer communities that will contribute to the on-going support and enhancement of the capability.

The process to become an Enterprise Tool starts when a member of the Enterprise Services Review Group (ESRG) sponsors the tool or project to enter an incubation phase. The goal of the incubation phase is to establish a mature software baseline supported by a diverse developer community that can effectively support the tool's continued growth and dependability. Graduation from the incubation phase requires the approval of the ESRG, a certified software baseline and a development community capable of supporting the tool. DoD components are encouraged to adopt Enterprise Tools rather than acquire or develop conflicting or duplicative capabilities.

In support of the Enterprise Tools initiative, SoftwareForge will provide a development environment for a project community during the incubation phase and beyond. SoftwareForge provides tools for successful growth of the project community and the management of the development effort. In order to enter the incubation phase, candidate project communities will need to establish a project leader, create a project on SoftwareForge, commit their source code to the SoftwareForge version control repository, post any file release, and establish trackers to manage requirements, bugs, issues, and change requests across the community. The SoftwareForge Community Support Team will assist the project community in establishing their project space and help to grow the project community by promoting it to other related projects, developers and users within Forge.mil.

More information on this effort will become available during May 2010 as the Enterprise Tools space is established and the first tools become approved by the ESRG.

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