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CWDS Conducts 'Sprint Review' on Agile Project

The DevOps Engineering team of the state's Child Welfare Digital Services provided an update on progress made on the project and answered questions concerning functionality and intentions as it moves forward. These events, called “sprint reviews,” have typically been directed more toward an internal audience, but the agency is aiming to make them more accessible for anyone who is following the project.

The DevOps Engineering team of the state's Child Welfare Digital Services provided an update last week on progress made on the project and answered questions concerning functionality and intentions as it moves forward.

According to the CWDS communications director, Bill Maile, these events, called “sprint reviews,” have typically been directed more toward an internal audience, but the agency is aiming to make them more accessible for anyone who is following the project.

“The goal is to ramp up production of these sorts of events to give stakeholders a better view into the project,” Maile told Techwire via email.

The CWDS project involves overhauling eight pieces of the state’s child welfare system, including functions such as case management and foster home licensing. The state is adopting an agile approach to setting up the new system that revolves around a pool of vendors. After vetting vendors to ensure their coding and design prowess, the CWDS will put out RFPs for smaller pieces one at a time, and the pool vendors can bid on them. 

During the sprint review, the team showed how several of the technologies will work.

The first demonstration was for ELK stack, which will be used for centralized logging. Its three-component system consists of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana.

The second demo was the resource management system through Docker, which manages consumption across containers that are individually configured.

New Relic was the third demo. This system evaluates metrics collected by the logging software to give the viewer an overview in comparison to other components. This will give a broader picture of what’s happening instead of seeing each event like the other systems might show.

The Jira pilot demo, still in early stages, shows a Kanban board, which automatically updates a story’s status as it is moved. The DevOps team has created a custom setting that will create a backlog that will work to categorize both public and sensitive information. Any information marked as private or sensitive will not be available for public view.

CWDS will be holding its monthly solution demonstration for stakeholders at 2 p.m. Aug. 14 via WebEx.