Attch_1_Mobile_PDO.pdf

Attachment 1

FA8771-18-RFS-0001

PROTOTYPE PROCESS DOCUMENTATION OUTLINE

The Air Force Business and Enterprise Systems (BES) Directorate is headquartered at Maxwell Air Force Base-Gunter Annex, Montgomery, AL. BES is an Air Force organization that acquires, operates, and sustains over 160 Air Force Business Systems across 21 Air Force customers, with most being client or web based applications. These systems support worldwide Air Force and DoD operations on a 24 x 7 basis. The architecture of these systems range from older COBOL systems to modern languages, like JAVA, hosted on several cloud environments. BES is continuing to onboard additional programs without additional resources to manage and develop the applications. BES struggles with the current business and technical management structure to support all of these capabilities due to each application’s specific technical design parameters. In addition, our customers strongly desire to begin creating mobile applications to compliment current systems fielded in BES, along with new capabilities for the future.

To address this need for the entire Air Force, BES is creating a Mobile Application Development Office in Montgomery. Unlike our current systems, the desire is for our mobile applications to have a similar: user experience, architecture, tool set, and scalable workforce, which would enable BES to efficiently manage and onboard additional capabilities from our customers. The initial mobile team will be staffed by 10 military developers. These developers have limited application development experience and will be part of the development team to help build AF Mobile apps. To begin the effort of turning BES into the Air Force’s mobile center of excellence, this prototype seeks industry’s best commercial and innovation business solutions without any DoD or Air Force constraints.

This office is the starting point for the effort below. Upon agreement award(s), leadership and advisors of the mobile team will be available for questions related to this project.

Background: PEO BES lacks a process for evaluating customer mobile application requirements, defining required resources, costing the activities for fulfillment of mobile application development and sustainment, and managing multiple customer mobile requirements across a number of development and sustainment cycles. PEO BES desires a standard, documented business process that enables the Government to staff and manage a mobile applications development team to deliver mobile applications across multiple devices (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, etc.). The mobile applications will access operational systems (in and outside of the BES portfolio) in varying cloud environments. Certain factors will influence the process. These factors include, but are not limited to the topics identified below. The use of flow diagrams, check lists, etc. are encouraged but not required.

Personnel: Recommend the optimal skill sets and experience needed to develop cross platform and native (iOS, Android, etc.) mobile applications. Recommend how each agile team should be organized, management structure for the team, and how to estimate the capacity of each team.

The recommendation should include a discussion on virtual vs. physical team standup, tools to improve team communication and collaboration, etc.

Agile Approach: Recommend the best mobile application development approach using an agile software methodology—Requirements (End-user capabilities) analysis, design, development, testing, security, deployment, backlog management, etc. It should include a lifecycle approach—requirements analysis, development and sustainment of a mobile application.

Scalability: Recommend how to scale staffing and agile approach in response to the ever growing volume and complexity of mobile capabilities. (e.g. Multiple teams working multiple projects, multiple teams working a single project, etc.)

Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP): Recommend the appropriate technical development environment to support the development of cross platform and native applications—tools, cloud integration, etc. The MADP will influence future plans for BES architecture standards going forward. The BES architecture will support common standards across desktop, web, and mobile platforms.

Training: Recommend training (classroom, online, etc.) for agile, mobile application development. Courses for the technical stack, automated test tools, agile mobile training, user experience mobile development, etc. In addition, recommend training for mobile development management. (Note: This may include the skills certification requirements for optimal skills sets referenced above in the Personnel section)

Cloud Service Dependency: Characterize the cloud mobile services that should be leveraged for different requirements. AF cloud efforts have been leveraging mobile service from Azure and AWS to date.

Architecture Requirements: Describe a mobile architecture that will access on premises and cloud based systems in multiple cloud environments (e.g. Azure, AWS, DISA Gov Cloud).

Recommend the primary cloud environment for the mobile architecture. Describe the related cloud costs for the recommended architecture.

Requirements Analysis Approach: Recommend scalable requirements analysis approach to quickly on-board requirement/user feedback for mobile requirements. It should be integrated in the Agile methodology for mobile application development.

Schedule Estimating: Recommend an approach to provide schedule estimates for requirements—estimating number of sprints for each mobile capability.

Cost Estimating: Recommend a cost model for estimating the cost for developing applications or updating requirements. The approach should include a cost estimate to develop the application and the sustainment cost across multiple years.

Cloud Development Environment Sizing: Using mobile, agile mobile application development cost expertise, recommend sizing for the cloud development environment. Should describe a scalable approach for developing multiple applications in the cloud.

User Experience: Recommend training and expertise for developing efficient, user friendly, mobile user experience. Recommend an approach for branding a BES approach for developing a common user experience across all the BES mobile applications.

BES Reuse and services library: Recommend a process for reusing modules, standardized cloud services, user experience, code repositories, etc. The library should be sharable with all Air Force units.

Governance: Recommend a governance process to approve requirements, new work, etc.

User Application Development: Recommend a process to bring in ideas and applications from Air Force user community.

Quality Tools: Recommend tools/cloud services that work well in the mobile application environment for software quality, security, architecture, etc. Recommend metrics for each tool set.

In order to help vendors understand the prototype, the graphic below helps convey what we are looking for (in a documented form):

MILESTONES:

MILESTONE 1: Written paper and briefing. The awardee will provide the first draft of the documented process, along with providing a briefing (with slides), summarizing the documented process. The briefing should also utilize the parameters above to design a business plan for the use case provided after contract award.

MILESTONE 2: Written paper and briefing. The awardee will provide the final of the documented process, along with providing a briefing (with slides), summarizing the documented process. The briefing should also provide any changes to the original business plan for the use case provided after contract award.