LCE Supports Development of Forge.mil, Boosting Capabilities of Military Software Developers
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The Situation
Life Cycle Engineering helped lead a Department of Defense (DoD) initiative aimed at using open source technology to create an environment which facilitates rapid development, test, certification, deployment and acceptance of products and services on the Global Information Grid (GIG).
Forge.mil, formerly called the Global Information Grid (GIG) Federated Development and Certification Environment (FDCE), emerged from the Net-Enabled Command Capability (NECC) program driven by efforts from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). DISA wanted a solution that would allow for DoD open source collaboration, as well as a platform that allowed for continuous integration and testing capabilities.
The Solution
With help from LCE, the Forge.mil team developed an initial prototype, and worked through DoD milestones to fully develop, integrate, and deploy an application with the following offerings:
SoftwareForge offers software development life-cycle (SDLC) management and version control functions for the DoD’s open source and community source software developers and also provides multiple repositories for personnel seeking reusable software components.
ProjectForge provides DoD projects and programs with the same capabilities available through SoftwareForge, but tailored for the needs of the individual project or program. The capability meets the needs of projects looking for application lifecycle management tools, but which are not doing open source software development.
- Jointly created the vision for a collaborative development environment.
- Provided program management, system development / integration (hardware and software), and functional/performance testing of new capabilities.
- Executed an agile software development process enabling quicker release of functionality upgrades than traditional development processes.
- Set up and maintained test, pre-production, and production environments, and coordinated the migration and installation of the SoftwareForge and ProjectForge production environments into DISA Defense Enterprise Computing Centers (DECC’s), and eventually migrated to milCloud and milCloud 2.0.
The Results
Forge.mil became a nationally acknowledged project with over 40,000 DoD end-users. The project’s goal was to allow DoD end-users to use open source technology to share information, provide situational awareness, and support self-synchronization among military software developers. In the first year alone, LCE helped the Forge.mil team accomplish the following:
- Provided a collaborative environment to accelerate the development and deployment of dependable software and services within the Department of Defense (DoD)
- Enabled DoD projects to collaborate in a federated / distributed environment (currently supports 4,400+ registered users and 267 projects)
- Increased communication between developers and customers resulting in increased attention to customer needs and a more comprehensive, agile solution
- Enabled cross-program discovery and sharing of software and services
- Provides a proven model for the successful planning, deployment, maintenance, and management of DISA Small Projects
- Achieved the following DISA Small Project milestones – IOC, LOA, and a three-year ATO
- Earned the Government Innovators Award from InformationWeek
- Forge.mil named “Great dot-gov Web Sites 2009” by Government Computer News (GCN)
