2: Agile/Incremental Development

Promote Agile/Incremental Development.

Other Information:

While not a panacea for IT acquisition, the iterative, incremental and collaborative processes of agile development will significantly raise the Government’s return on its IT investment. It will do this by engaging with users more effectively, deploying capability more quickly and keeping better pace with rapid advancements in such technologies as cloud computing and software as a service. Making the shift to increased use of agile/incremental development will be a challenge for industry as well as the Government. Key actions that we recommend for meeting that challenge are defining a common framework, sharing best practices and aligning industry capabilities to support the new process. Performance Measures - As noted above, the key to implementing successful agile acquisition strategies for IT will involve clearly defining the elements of agile IT acquisition and then building organizations, workforce capabilities and processes to support them. Once implementation has progressed sufficiently, OMB, working through the Federal agencies, needs to establish a set of benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of the new incremental approach. The obvious metrics of performance of the new approach are schedule, the degree of rework needed in a program to achieve required performance capabilities and the degree to which the program is within budgeted costs. Agencies can then combine these gross measurements of program performance with a consistent approach to root cause analysis for negative performance based on these metrics.

Objective(s):

2.1: Definition

2.2: Exhibit 300

2.3: Funding Cycles

2.4: Templates and Training

2.5: Agile/Incremental Development Contracts

2.6: Best Practices

2.7: Advocacy

2.8: Capability Alignment

Content