Request_for_Information_TnG_Modernization.pdf

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI)

Targeting & Geospatial-Intelligence Program Management Office

THIS NOTICE IS NOT A REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL. This notice is for information and planning purposes only. In accordance with Part 10 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the Government is conducting market research to determine the availability and adequacy of potential business sources in developing the software identified below that meets the Government's requirements. This Request for Information (RFI) does not constitute a solicitation for bids or proposals and it is not to be construed as a commitment by the Government. The information herein is subject to change and in no way binds the Government to solicit for or award a competitive contract. Proprietary information will be accepted and handled appropriately. Responders should indicate which portions of their responses are proprietary and should mark them accordingly. The Government is not obligated to and will not reimburse the contractor for any costs associated with preparing or submitting a response to this notice and submittals will not be returned to the sender.

This RFI is from the Targeting & Geo-spatial Intelligence (T&G) Program Management Office (PMO), Intelligence Systems Branch (HBBI) of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC), Battle Management Directorate (HB) located at 11 Barksdale Street, Hanscom

AFB, MA 01731.

1.0 Description

1.1 The T&G PMO is seeking information on how an interested contractor could provide staffing- -software engineers, designers, & program managers to participate in government-led agile software-development product teams. These teams would be co-located in an off-site government facility/contracted partner facility or in the contractor’s facility. The contractor & its employees must be proficient in an agile software development methodology (extreme/paired programming preferred), lean methodologies, cloud-native (12 factor) applications, user-centered design, test-driven development, continuous integration & continuous delivery pipelines with >85% test coverage, and deploying to a cloud native platform (Pivotal Cloud Foundry preferred). In order for the government to use a contractor facility, it must be within the greater Boston area and workstations must set up for paired programming with open area for teams of up to 10 individuals.

2.0 Background

The T&G PMO is pursuing a modernization effort which seeks to leverage the advantages of a cloud platform to build cloud-native applications using a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline that meets all regulatory testing and cybersecurity requirements in order to establish a lean, user-centered approach that will ultimately redefine how Targeting & GEOINT capability is delivered to the Air Force warfighter. This will involve re-platforming of some legacy applications and refactoring them to be cloud-native, green-fielding of some legacy applications, on-boarding commercial SaaS, and net-new application development. The end goal is a comprehensive, end-to-end Targeting & GEOINT capability that delivers value to the end-user.

The primary focus will be on building the right thing. Many contractors have worked with the government on so-called agile software development projects, but have practiced water-scrum-fall. We seek to avoid the pitfalls of up-front waterfall requirements processes and backend waterfall test and delivery processes.

Our proposed team structure for this government-led software development is depicted below. We anticipate an initial need of 10-12 developers and 1-2 designers and doubling that number by the end of the first year. By the end of year two we hope to reach a steady state number of 32 contractor personnel.

2.1 Planned Start Date: NLT 31 July 2018

2.2 Delivery Period: Two (2) years (1 yr Base, 1 yr Option)

2.3 Limitations: All employees involved in the project must be U.S. Citizens and access to the project, tools, repositories, and data must be controlled in a way that would prevent any non-citizens from accessing.

2.4 Security Requirements: At least 1 person per product team must obtain a Secret clearance.

2.5 Total Estimated Contract Value: $7- $15M

3.0 Requested Information

Please provide a White Paper (no more than 10 pages) that contains the following information:

3.1 Company Overview: A brief overview of your company and personnel. Also, if your company is a prime vendor on any Government Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) vehicle(s) (i.e. GSA Alliant, STARS-II, NETCENTS II, etc.) please provide a list of these contracts.

3.2 Technical Overview: Provide your company’s technical overview as it relates to extreme/paired programming, lean methodologies, cloud-native (12 factor) applications, user-centered design, test-driven development, continuous integration & continuous delivery pipelines with >85% test coverage, and deploying to Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

3.3 Previous US Government Contracts/Efforts: If your company has worked with a

Government Agency on a software intensive program, please identify the projects, whether you were a prime or subcontractor, points of contact, dates, contract numbers, dollar value, period of performance, the domain of production environment (e.g. NIPR, SIPR, JWICS, etc.), and whether or not your company led or contributed to a Risk Mitigation Framework package for an interim authority to test (IATT) or authority to operate (ATO).

3.4 Boston Area Facility Information: Please indicate if you have a facility in the greater

Boston area or would be willing to establish a facility in the greater Boston area. Also, please provide the following information:

3.4.1 Describe how you would set up the facility to perform the methodologies listed in 3.2.

3.4.2 Provide pictures and floorplans.

3.4.3 Ability to have workstations set up for paired programming with an open area for teams.

3.4.4 Describe how your facility or future facility could meet the following demand

(notional):

3.4.4.1 Initial need of 10-12 developers and 0-2 designers

3.4.4.2 End of year one 20-24 developers and 2-4 designers

3.4.4.3 Steady state (some time during year two) an estimated 32 contractor personnel

3.4.4.4 Host 10-12* government personnel on a daily basis as part of an integrated

Government/Contractor team. (*steady state number)

3.4.5 Ability to host Government personnel in your facility as part of an integrated

Government/Contractor team.

3.5 Technical Question Responses: Provide a response answering as many of the following questions as feasible. Reponses should address how your company has employed agile software development methodologies, especially continuous delivery, as it applies to applications your company has worked on/delivered. Ensure that your response directly links your answers to the questions below:

1. Provide a brief overview of your current deployment and production cycle.

2. How often does your organization deploy code to production or to end users? Can they do it on demand, throughout the software delivery cycle?

3. What is your lead time for changes (i.e., how long does it take to go from code commit to code successfully running in production)?

4. How do you recommend instituting a process for such changes?

5. How long does it generally take to restore service when a service incident occurs (e.g., unplanned outage, service impairment)?

6. What percentage of the changes either result in degraded service or subsequently require remediation (e.g., lead to service impairment, service outage, require a hotfix, rollback, fix forward, patch)?

7. What percentage of your code is covered by automated tests? What tools do you use for test automation?

8. Do you test security requirements as a part of your automated testing process?

9. Has Information Security made pre-approved, easy-to-consume libraries, packages, toolchains and processes for developers and IT operations to use in their work?

10. How do you ensure effective test data management?

11. What is the average lifetime of branches or forks before being merged into trunk?

12. How many active branches do you have at any given time, on average?

13. Do you institute code freeze periods when people can’t merge code or pull requests?

14. Describe the extent to which teams slice up products and features into small batches that can be completed in less than a week and released frequently, including the use of MVPs (minimum viable products).

15. How do you ensure teams have a good understanding of the flow of work from the business all the way through to customers, and whether they have visibility into this flow, including the status of products and features.

16. How do you actively and regularly seek customer feedback, and incorporate this feedback into the design of their products. How is it prioritized?

17. What percentage of your work, would you say, is manual for each of these for categories:

configuration management, testing, deployments, and change approval processes.

18. Would you say that fast feedback on the quality and deployability of the system is available to everyone on the team, and people make acting on this feedback their highest priority? Please provide at least one recent example.

19. Describe how you would architect a software system so that testing can be done without requiring an integrated environment.

20. Can applications you’ve developed be deployed or released independently of other applications and services that it depends on? If so, how have you architected for this?

21. Do you empower teams to make their own tool decisions and implementations? Provide a recent example where a team has done this and describe the outcome.

22. Describe how your organization would approve large-scale changes to the design of its system if it were not dictated in a contract.

23. Please provide metrics for deployments during normal business hours, to include downtimes.

24. How much of the architecture you have developed is patterned as microservices?

25. Describe the extent to which you employ API-based collaboration.

26. What experience do you have building web applications? Please provide any government contract numbers and points of contacts if possible.

27. What frameworks and programming languages were utilized in building the aforementioned web applications?

28. Describe the object-oriented patterns you have utilized building web applications

29. What experience do you have with databases?

30. Describe the process you use for building a web application with multiple contributors.

31. Describe your company's experience with Agile software development processes. What tools has your company used to assist in participating in or executing Agile processes?

32. What metrics would your company use to report success with the resources (time and money) invested and by the government?

33. Please provide any relevant examples of experience with contributing code to any open source software report.

34. Tell us about a time you successfully employed a strangler pattern during a legacy application replatforming.

35. Provide an example of applications where you had to use existing data that was constrained with proprietary data formats.

36. What contract types would you recommend in our proposed agile development setting and why?

37. Do you offer these services in the commercial marketplace? If so, please provide examples.

38. Describe your company’s hiring, retention and training practices. Identify your company turnover ratio and how quickly you can replace personnel.

39. Does your company have experience developing on Pivotal Cloud Foundry?

40. What additional expertise do you have that you feel is relevant?

4.0 Responses

4.1 Interested parties are requested to respond to this RFI with a white paper.

4.2 White papers in Microsoft Word are due no later than Monday, 11 September 2017, 1600 EDT. Responses shall be limited to 10 pages and submitted via e-mail to kristina.botelho@us.af.mil. Please be advised that all submissions become Government property and will not be returned.

4.3. Section 1 of the white paper shall provide administrative information (not included in the page count), and shall include the following as a minimum:

4.3.1. Name, mailing address, cage code, DUNS, phone number, fax number, and e-mail of designated point of contact.

4.3.2. North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 541512, Computer Systems Design Services -Business type (large business, small business, small disadvantaged business, 8(a)-certified small disadvantaged business, HUBZone small business, woman-owned small business, very small business, veteran-owned small business, service-disabled veteran-owned small business) based upon.

4.3.3 The facility security clearance

4.4.4 What contract types would you recommend in our proposed agile development setting and why?

4.4.5 Do you offer these services in the commercial marketplace? If so, please provide examples.

5.0 Questions

Questions regarding this announcement shall be submitted in writing by e-mail to the Contracting Officer, kristina.botelho@us.af.mil.

KRISTINA T. BOTELHO

Contracting Officer Intelligence Systems Branch mailto:kristina.botelho@us.af.mil mailto:kristina.botelho@us.af.mil