USCIS seeks agile approach to application life cycle management

WHAT: Justification for a limited-sources solicitation by the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for a pilot of AgileCraft's life cycle management tool.

WHY: USCIS' Office of Information Technology wants to try AgileCraft's scaled agile management platform to help administer a widening variety of portfolio-level planning, tracking and reporting operations.

USCIS said its portfolio managers, executives and other decision-makers now rely on manual and ad hoc reports from their teams, which use a variety of application life cycle management (ALM) tools, including LeanKit, Rally and VersionOne.

According to the solicitation, the office does not have a centralized, easy-to-access way to visualize work in progress and manipulate future work at the enterprise, portfolio and program levels.

Large organizations and companies are increasingly choosing life cycle management tools to help them develop and deploy complex systems, including IT solutions. ALM software gathers many tools into a single overarching suite of software that makes managing those processes easier for a large organization.

AgileCraft's open platform combines planning, analysis, forecasting and visualization with multilevel collaboration and management capabilities, according to the company's website. The platform complements and extends existing agile tools, methods and processes and can be deployed via the cloud or on premise.

In its solicitation, USCIS said its market research and analysis showed that AgileCraft was the most suitable solution because it supports all five ALM tools at the agency and uses methods such as Scrum, Kanban and hybrid agile development frameworks. It also supports Open API for future third-party integrations.

Click here to read the RFI.