Configuration Management Working Group

Tuesday, 8 February 2011

Meeting Location: Carahsoft Technology Corporation

Meeting Agenda:

• General Announcements

• Audience Introductions
  • Name
  • Company
  • Open
    • Looking for job (always bring resumes)
    • Looking for new hires
    • CM info exchange

• Break/Networking

• Informative Presentation
  • ITIL by Suzanne Ourand PPT PDF

• Presentation on Agile, Open, and Cloud by Mike Kochanik, Vice President & GM, CollabNet Federal
  • Speaker Information
    • Mike Kochanik is Vice President and General Manager for the Federal Sector at CollabNet. As a member of CollabNet's business team since the company's founding in 1999, Mike has worked to develop the strategic vision of how Collaborative Software Development, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Open Source software strategies can be leveraged by commercial enterprises and government agencies, transforming that way software is developed. In 2007, Mike was responsible for founding CollabNet's Clouding Computing and Virtualization practice and brought to market the industry's first Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution offering for LabManagement.
    • Mike has been an active and long-time participant in open government initiatives and government acquisition reform, as it pertains to the way government agencies acquire and develop new software capabilities. Many of the tenets resulting from these efforts are reflected in current government policy, such as the Defense Department Memorandum on the use of Open Source software (Oct. 2009) and OMB's Open Government Directive (Dec. 2009). As the managing executive in charge of CollabNet's Federal business, Mike has led CollabNet to be recognized by others in the industry. The World Economic Forum recently named CollabNet a 2010 Tech Pioneer, a recognition given to the most innovative companies from around the globe that will have a critical impact on the future of business and society.
    • Prior CollabNet, Mike was a founding business team member of two hightech start-up companies, Geodesic Systems and IKOS Systems, where he worked to bring both companies to profitability and successful liquidity events for their shareholders. At IKOS Systems, he was a significant contributor to the development of one of the first language-based simulators for very large scale integrated circuits (VLSI). Mike started his career in technology at Lockheed Martin, where he was a Senior Systems Engineer working on the Trident Missile programs and FAA programs. Mike holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology and an MBA from Seton Hall University.
    • Mike was a moderator at the recent DoD Agile Conference.
      • On the conference videos, he can be seen on Video 4: Getting Agile: Lessons from the Field
      • Videos of the Proceedings are available.

  • Presentation Information

    • Want a SCM job, them you better Know Subversion and Know SCRUM
      • If you haven't look at our more advanced tools, CollabNet TeamForge SCM or CollabNet TeamForge ALM, perhaps it would be worth your time. Both these have passed FISMA audits and DIACAP audits to a moderate level. PKI/CAC support and integration to LDAP SSO databases is possible.
      • CollabNet recently made available an online 90 day evaluation of CollabNet's TeamForge (Agile ALM "Application Lifecycle Management" In the Cloud) solution. Signing up for this free trial takes about 5 minutes and you are left with your own project workspace for up to 25 users for 90 days. There is NO software to download or install. The project workspace comes deployed with a video overview and web based training to get you started.
      • Sign up here for the trial

    • Here are some reasons why Federal agencies should invest in learning more about how CollabNet TeamForge can benefit their organization:
      • TeamForge is use by over 15,000 Federal users and is the same platform that powers the Defense Department's Forge.mil program for ALM in the DoD Cloud. Forge.mil is used by over 6,500 users and 350 software projects across the DoD.
      • TeamForge leverages Subversion, the #1 requested job skill for software configuration management (SCM) and near de-facto open standard for SCM across Federal Agencies. See for yourself.
      • TeamForge natively empowers the use of SCRUM, the #1 requested job skill for Agile software developers and is the prescribed methodology for fielding IT systems in the 2010 Defense Appropriations Bill, Section 804. See for yourself
      • TeamForge is fully integrated with the leading Integrated Development Environments, Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio, which means that developers have almost no impact to existing work routines in switching to TeamForge.
      • TeamForge has achieved compliance to relevant Federal standards, such as FISMA, DIACAP, HSPD 12 - CAC/PKI, and Section 508.
      • If you choose to take a test drive please feel free to contact Mike directly.

    • Building Agile ALM in the Cloud
      • The Defense Department's latest budget approval, HR 2647, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, mandates Agile development, as the method for fielding future IT systems. This session will discuss examples of how Agile development is being employed on Federal projects and how cloud-based infrastructure is enabling the Federal government to address budget constraints and open government mandates.

    • Agile Development
      • The Federal Government is facing a proliferation of issues and a scarcity of resources to address them, while simultaneously leadership is demanding a shift toward Open Government, as witness by the OMB Open Government Directive. One area acutely impacted by these demands is application software lifecycle management, where traditional government contracting forces organization to pursue a “grand design” approach or waterfall software methodology. These more traditional software development methodologies are losing ground to more Agile software development methodologies with an increased focus on achieving incremental results, transparency of success, and interactive customer collaboration.

    • Forge.mil
      • Is there any discussion or sense of the dollars or time saved by going this approach versus what would have been the traditional model?
      • One of the numbers that Collabnet put together in terms of ROI was focused solely on the costs savings from a start-up perspective. If I needed software development tools for my own use, I had to go off and do the acquisition and do the certification and then operate and maintain those. Looking at just the Forge users today, we're estimating that from a start-up perspective, we saved each program about $15 million overall.
      • Please do give this a read

• Our next meeting is scheduled for 12 April! More Details to follow.