US Citizenship and Immigration Services Adopting Agile
Agile practices can flourish when used in teams of varying sizes, but the methodology is about to be incorporated into one of the largest and most powerful organizations in the world—the United States government. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is the Department of Homeland Security agency meant to oversee lawful immigration, is aiming to automate the integration and delivery of its software projects with a new, paperless immigration system.
Under a $12 million contact, software solutions companies Coveros and InfoZen will use continuous integration and continuous delivery under an agile framework to automate the government agency's processes and help it go totally digital. A currently complex system will be streamlined through smarter practices, which is a nice change from the more bulky government services like HealthCare.gov.
The agile practices will be used to construct and deploy software and provision servers, with heavy reliance on automation from the build and test stages all the way through production. It’s a major undertaking that will require the assistance of ten different teams, so communication between the developers and IT personnel will be vital.
“DevOps has become a critical component in accelerating delivery of mission-critical applications and systems while also increasing agility and controlling software development costs,” said Jeffery Payne, CEO of Coveros, in a recent press release.
Research by CA Technologies posits that using DevOps in an enterprise environment can lead to a 17 percent to 23 percent increase in revenue and new customer acquisition, so the benefits here are absolutely tangible. Of course, this is just one department we’re currently dealing with; so, before we start talking about revamping additional agencies, we’ll have to see where these changes take the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Along with the software and provision servers, the teams will produce metrics to improve software development practices and lend a helping hand to the Citizenship and Immigration Services stakeholders as progress is made. Lastly, a standardized and repeatable build and deployment environment will be enabled through a continuous integration and delivery pipeline.
The government has been looking to move to a more secure, paperless immigration service since May 2012. Higher-ups understand that the current system is both clunky and unrefined, so there’s no better time than the present to incorporate continuous integration, continuous delivery, DevOps, and agile into different government agencies that deal with information of the highest importance.
