In a request for offer released Tuesday, the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) said it is seeking assistance in creating an Enterprise Testing Office (ETO). HCD “seeks to obtain professional consulting that will provide a team of resources to establish and stand up an Agile development environment, provide hands-on training and complete knowledge transfer to the ITB,” according to the RFO. Among the takeaways:
- The department’s IT Branch (ITB) deploys new technology as well as maintaining and refreshing existing systems across digital, mobile and the cloud. But the ongoing advent of new tech means HCD must “establish more refined testing standards, thus increasing emphasis on end-to-end business process testing, regression testing” and user acceptance testing, including test script documentation. ITB, the RFO said, must adopt an Agile framework “to ensure high business process quality, to reduce risk to the organization, accelerate innovation and sharpen testing competency.” The technology environment ITB supports includes Oracle 11g and 19c, MySQL, Azure and PeopleSoft Cloud, and Hyper-V.
- The contractor should be responsible for work under HCD’s assigned contract manager or designee “to lead the contracted team and HCD IT staff on all activities” including discovery, gap analysis, procurements, implementation and maintenance. The company will create a plan to stand up the ETO, identify gaps in processes, evaluate automated testing tools, assist in recommendations on testing procurement, and develop training and knowledge transfer. Specific tasks include developing a project management plan, implementing testing functions and processes, test planning and a testing road map; and development of an ongoing ETO workload analysis.
- The company chosen must have “proven success” in the IT industry as well as two years of experience in “delivery project management services that include establishing Enterprise Testing Office policies and procedures”; and two years’ experience in providing business and technical writing expertise including “development of business requirements.” The senior project manager must have experience including at least five years managing IT projects that include in-house builds and/or commercial, off-the-shelf solutions. The senior technical lead must have taken the lead role in at least three California state agency or large company software testing efforts and new system implementations. And the technical lead must have experience including two years working in Agile and DevOps; four years testing experience with “Web, client server, desktop and software-as-a-service” apps; and four years’ experience with test-driven and behavior-driven development.
- The contract’s term is a little more than two years and its maximum financial threshold is $1.5 million. Responses are due March 16, and the anticipated contract award date is March 23rd. The anticipated service commencement date is April 19, and the “anticipated contract term” is June 30, 2023.
