The California Child Welfare Digital Services project, which the state government’s technology officials are treating as a pilot for agile methods, has awarded an early contract for development operations to CivicActions. Beyond the initial core contract, there are six potential opportunities to extend. Each extension is three months.
The contract with the Berkeley-based firm has an initial ceiling of $680,000, with extension options that could extend the limit to $4.8 million. However, the actual pricing will be based on CivicActions’ CMAS.
Aaron Pava, chief experience officer of CivicActions, said the company will treat its code as being open to the public by default, and it will seek to automate testing and deployment.
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 requests for proposal for smaller pieces one at a time and the pool vendors can bid on them. In its DevOps role, CivicActions will serve as a coordinating force among the various vendors and will help to test new bits of code to make sure they work with everything that’s already in place.
The approach shares direct heritage with the fallout from the failure of the original HealthCare.gov website that crashed under high user demand when the Affordable Care Act went into effect. That event led to the creation of federal agencies like 18F, which stressed iterative approaches that can respond better to unanticipated problems like that ill-fated website faced.
California Department of Technology officials have treated the project as a means of pilot-testing agile methods, hoping that success with the modular effort could pave the way for its adoption with other tech projects.
This story was originally published by Govtech.com.
