This summer the Army turned the normal software development cycle on its ear by issuing "Apps for the Army," the Army’s first internal application development challenge. Launched March 1, in just 75 days, 141 Soldiers and Army civilians registered in teams or as individuals to participate in the A4A challenge. By the May 15 deadline, 53 Web and mobile applications were developed and submitted.
The Apps for the Army challenge was the drumbeat at this year's LandWarNet, held in Tampa, Fla., Aug. 3-5. The theme of the conference was "Providing Global Cyber Dominance to Joint/Combined Commanders." The Army Chief Information Officer/G-6 is the sponsor for A4A, and the apps were a popular topic of discussion at the sessions and among conference attendees.
"We have a lot of capability within our Soldiers and our civilians that support this Army," said Lt. Gen. Jeff Sorenson, the Army CIO/G-6. "Given the opportunity to expose them to ways to either innovate or create different improvements in the way we operate as an Army or the way they have to live — if we just give them that opportunity to do such, the result normally is magic."
The Army provided the challenge participants with key resources, such as the Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE), a multi-platform, cloud-based, secure development environment, hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency. "You now have a computing environment that you can surge, you can expand, you can reduce," Sorenson said. RACE offered access to on-demand virtual Windows and Red Hat Linux development environments for Android, BlackBerry, SharePoint, LAMP and ASP.net platforms. Forge.mil, a family of services provided to support the Defense Department's technology development community, was also provided to participants. It served as the collaborative software repository for competitors. To facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas, problems and solutions relevant to the A4A initiative, milBook, the Army's internal Facebook solution, with more than 76,000 users, was used rather than e-mail.
After passing security certification, the apps were judged in five categories by a panel from across the Army. The categories include: Information Access, Location Aware, Training, Warfighting/Mission Specific and MWR/other.
Each of the five categories had first, second and third place winners who received $3,000, $1,500 and $1,000 respectively; there were also categories for honorable mention. Entries were judged on six criteria that assessed each application's usefulness, usability, appeal, inventiveness, effectiveness and viability.
"Usability seemed to be the No. 1 criterion with most of the judges," said Marvin Wages, A4A program manager. "Most of the judges say, well, I would really use this."
The top five A4A winners were recognized at LandWarNet.
New Recruit, an Android application, took first place in the Information Access category. It provides information for potential recruits that includes: military rank and insignia, Army news feeds, an Army physical fitness test calculator and a body mass index calculator.
First place in the Location Aware category was presented to the Movement Projection application, a map-routing Android app for road navigation that allows Soldiers to input obstacles and threats, in addition to stops, start and end points, and calculates the best and fastest route.
Physical Readiness Trainer, the first place winner in the Training category, is an iPhone app that helps Soldiers develop their own physical training program based on the Army’s new Physical Readiness Training program. It provides training plans and videos of exercises. “We saw this as a new way that maybe training manuals in the future could be shown, something that is searchable and is fairly easy to navigate but also adds that media component,” said Maj. Greg Motes, one of the app developers.
Disaster Relief Operations, an Android application that assists Army personnel working in humanitarian relief and civilian affairs, received first place in the Warfighting/Mission Specific category. It is a data survey, dissemination and analysis tool for accessing and creating maps viewable on Google Earth and Google Maps.
First place in the MWR/other category was awarded to the Telehealth Mood Tracker. This self-monitoring Android application allows users to track their psychological health over a period of days, weeks and months using a visual analogue rating scale. Users can track experiences associated with deployment-related behavioral health issues.
Winning apps are available at the Army Application Marketplace: https://storefront.mil/army/. For desktop access, a DoD CAC is needed. Users browsing from an iPhone and Android-based smartphones do not need a CAC. For more information about the Army CIO/G-6, go to http://ciog6.army.mil/.
Holly Quick is a contributor to CHIPS and an operations research analyst with Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic.