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DISA DELIVERS DOD COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Arlington, Va. - The Defense Department's newest collaborative software development tool just took another crucial step today in reaching full operational capability. The Defense Information Systems Agency declared its Forge.mil is now at initial operational capability for unclassified use within DoD.

"The community's response to our LOA capability has been phenomenal," said Dave Mihelcic, DISA's Chief Technology Officer. "The initial adoption rate was far greater than our initial predictions. Based on the positive feedback that we've received from our early adopters, we know that it's time to open the site for general availability," he added.

Creating a new approach to delivering and deploying technology within the DoD, Forge.mil enables collaborative software development and cross-program sharing of software, system components, and services in support of net-centric operations and warfare. It capitalizes on concepts proven in open source software development that have already reaped tremendous benefits for software and technology development communities.

The IOC decision coincides with release 2 of SoftwareForge, providing significant performance improvements. "The platform scaled very well during the rapid growth we experienced during the LOA period," said Rob Vietmeyer, Forge.mil Project Director. "We've achieved even greater performance with the new release and automated many of the system administration functions to ensure dependable capability as the user community grows," noted Vietmeyer.

SoftwareForge, the initial Forge.mil capability, enables sharing and collaborative development of open source and community source software within DoD software development community. Building on the best practices and technologies used in the open source community, SoftwareForge delivers a secure and reliable platform that meets DoD's requirements. This initial release comes after three months of limited operational availability, during which SoftwareForge rapidly grew to over 1300 users and 60 development efforts.

For open source and community source software developers, SoftwareForge provides the tools needed for distributed development including software version control, bug tracking, requirements management, and release packaging, along with collaboration tools, such as wikis, discussion forums, and document repositories. Following SoftwareForge, Forge.mil will be deploying a Software as a Service version of these tools designed to meet the application development needs of restricted access and classified development effort. In addition, Forge.mil will be deploying tools and services to enable the rapid testing and certification of the software components being develop within the Forge.mil environment.

Along with DISA's Rapid Access Computing Environment, Forge.mil provides a key component of DISA's move to provide cloud computing services. Together they provide unique capabilities to accelerate DoD technology development, RACE providing a rapidly deployable hardware environment and Forge.mil providing the supporting software development environment. RACE provides Forge.mil users and customers with a secure, flexible, and scalable software ecosystem that's the future of DoD IT infrastructure.