The Defense Department’s (DoD) count of software factories operating across the agency has reached approximately 50 as the Pentagon works to put in place tenets of the software strategy implementation plan that it released in March of this year, said Lily Zeleke, deputy chief information officer (CIO) for the Information Enterprise Office in DoD’s Office of the CIO.
Speaking during a Dec. 4 Nextgov/FCW event, Zeleke talked about how the software factory push goes hand in hand with efforts to put into action the DoD Software Modernization Strategy released last year. The strategy aims to enable delivery of resilient software capabilities at the “speed of relevance,” and makes up one of the sub-strategies of the Pentagon’s Digital Modernization Strategy.
The implementation plan released earlier this year puts high on the priority list the adoption of cloud services, and a “new commitment toward a department-wide approach for software factories.”
Discussing the software factory effort, Zeleke said, “this is a new way of doing software and a new way of innovating and bringing software at speed on a continuous basis – continuous delivery is what we call it – a pipeline. We don’t want that to stop.”
“The software factories brought forth our ability to really see in real terms that it can be done, at speed,” she said.
Zeleke cited the Air Force’s Kessel Run software factory operation as groundbreaking in the larger factory effort and said “now we have up to 50” factories across the agency.
The software factory expansion effort, she said, is being managed through the software modernization implementation plan.
“We’ve laid out some key aspects of it,” Zeleke continued. “One is really laying out guidance and standards, which we’re working towards right now.”
“In some cases, we’ve already brought forth the DevSecOps … what the software factories do is bring these aspects together with the user input,” she said.
“So, we are already working, we’ve done reference design steps like ops reference designs, activities, tools, everything that supports our ability to have consistent software factory, foundational software factory implementation and adoption across the board,” Zeleke said.
“They’re all not going to be cookie cutters,” she said of the factory expansion effort, “but at a minimum, we’re laying out the foundational guidance for the software factories.”
“In addition, we’re also really focused on doing software factory inventory, because … we don’t want a proliferation of software factories where … 10 software factories are doing the same exact thing,” Zeleke said.
“I think you all hear us use the word rationalization a lot with cloud, with systems, networks, everything,” she said. “Just like anything, if not managed … if not tracked, and if not really looked after in a real way, this has an opportunity to sort of get out of hand, but I think everybody recognizes that.”
“So, we’re conducting a good software inventory across the department to sort of establish what is the enterprise criteria,” she said. “We are not there yet, but that’s one of the things that the strategy sets out that we’re going to do which will help us. And appropriate metrics, of course, accountability is always imperative in this case.”
“The other piece is really establishing the right work roles for software because that’s one of our biggest challenges,” Zeleke said. “You can expand as much as you want the software factories, but if we don’t have the right skill sets and the right people are deployed across, that’s going to be a challenge.”
“Our ability to have the right work roles, the right designation … this is working across the department with our DoD CIO workforce team but as well as other organizations to make sure that we can hire, train, and retain the right work skills for this aspect,” she said.
“This is really the formal way that we’re going about it through this strategy and it’s through the software modernization SSG, but as we are doing this and as we’re sort of working on the formal guidance and structure, etc. at a grassroots level, the software factories recognize this as well and they’re have formed a coalition of software factories, and they’re getting after the same kinds of things,” Zeleke said.
“It’s really beautiful to see actually the top-down and the bottom-up are sort of thinking about the same exact thing and we’re coalescing to make sure that we have a consistent approach across the board,” she said.
