FBI Sentinel a test for agile development

As part of its effort to improve the performance of IT investments, the federal government aims to move from a traditional model of software development, in which everything is developed in one fell swoop, to the modern model of agile development.

With the agile approach, software is developed in small chunks, quickly providing users with incremental capabilities and letting them adapt to adapt to technological changes in closer to real time. This approach makes it possible to identify problems with projects before huge sums of money have been spent.

Agile development is a key feature of the Office of Management and Budget’s 25-point plan for improving IT management, and it was a central recommendation of last year's industry-sponsored panel on improving IT acquisition, which I co-chaired with Linda Gooden from Lockheed Martin (you can read the report here).

The latest issue of InformationWeek -- a trade weekly that covers the business aspects of IT, with the occasional article on government IT -- includes an interesting column titled "FBI recasts Sentinel as a model of agility."

The FBI has a relatively new CIO, Chad Fulgham, a senior IT executive at Lehman Brothers. (Readers, resist the temptation to snicker here -- IT had nothing to do with Lehman's collapse, and actually the government would have an almost-impossible time attracting somebody with those kinds of credentials absent a corporate bankruptcy). Fulgham, coming from the private sector, probably takes agile development more or less for granted. He is trying to apply this approach to Sentinel, the FBI’s long-troubled effort to digitize and automate case handling at the bureau. Using agile development principles, developers are trying to come up with some new incremental capability every few weeks, with a broad release scheduled for September. It is interesting that InformationWeek, which runs very little on government IT, thinks this is an important enough development to be worth writing about.