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ing faster than waterfall development can handle.”
There is an interesting discussion, which was new to me at least, of the advantages of agile for ongoing devel- opment of cyber defense capabilities. “Checking a software system’s code- base daily keeps manageable the num- ber of changes required to comply with a large base of cyber rules,” the report states. “When a new vulnerability is discovered, additional rules are formu- lated to detect similar errors in code.”
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the DSB report is the timing of its publication. The report might be coming at just the right time. Stan Soloway — an old friend, former senior DOD acquisition innovation offi- cial from my government days in the 1990s and currently president and CEO of consulting firm Celero Strategies — said the Defense Digital Service and the Defense Innovation Unit Experi- mental launched by former Defense Secretary Ash Carter are turning out to be more influential than many pre- dicted, which ties in to my conclusion in a blog post awhile ago that the U.S. Digital Service and 18F were becom- ing part of the federal IT ecosystem.
“To some extent, it is the result of the uniformed military leader- ship (think ‘customer’) pushing back against a traditional system that doesn’t deliver,” Soloway said.
Congress recently directed the Defense Innovation Board to study the use of agile software develop- ment for DOD. At the end of March, DOD’s inspector general — not exactly an organization that is usually leading the push for innovation — published a report titled “Contracting Strategy for F-22 Modernization.” Published after the DSB report, it criticizes DOD for not developing a new contracting strat-
egy to support a move to agile develop- ment for software for the next genera- tion of the F-22 fighter.
Even more recently, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustain- ment Ellen Lord said: “I believe we are at an inflection point in terms of doing things differently. We are piv- oting from the traditional waterfall software development methodology to agile and DevOps. So we are coding every day [and] testing every night.”
Soloway told me that although there is uncertainty about how exactly agile will be implemented, “the debate is over. Agile is the way forward. I don’t think there is much debate anymore over its efficacy.”
Better late than never
At the end of the 1990s, after a period during which innovation was heavily promoted in the procurement sys- tem, I noted a change in the delay from when a management innovation was developed in the private sector to when it reached the government. When I joined the government in 1993, agencies were still buying off-the-shelf software in individual shrink-wrapped packages, though the private sector had moved to site licenses perhaps a decade earlier. The government moved to site licenses later that decade.
In addition, by the late 1990s, the gap between the introduction of reverse auctions for buying commer- cial items in the private sector and the government was down to a little more than a year. I was proud of that change.
Fast-forward to agile software development. The “Agile Manifesto” was published in 2001, and over the next several years, agile methodolo- gies started to spread in commercial software development and eventually became the standard approach. The
idea didn’t really hit the federal gov- ernment until about 2012 or so, and it has been spreading only gradually.
So we seem to be back to a 10-year gap between when innovations appear in the private sector and when they are adopted in government. That delay is far too long. If DOD gets serious about moving to agile, it will be a tipping point for its use in government. That’s a long time, but better late than never.
If agile starts becoming the common way to do business, agencies will need to grapple with how to do it right. The IG’s report on F-22 modernization high- lights a concrete problem with con- tracting strategy: Traditional methods to incentivize contractor performance do not apply so well when deliverables are not specified in advance, which will happen as agile spreads.
More broadly, the government needs to adapt its contract manage- ment processes to an agile world. The limited experience so far suggests that agile requires more, or at least differ- ent, contract management resources to allow frequent communication between customers and developers. I am starting some research work on post-award contract management at the Department of Homeland Security, and the people helping me have told me this has been their experience with agile orders.
Perhaps the TechFAR team at USDS and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy needs to be reconstituted to address such questions. n
Steve Kelman is a professor of public management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and former admin- istrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. His blog can be found at fcw.com/thelectern.
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