The Legislative Budget Board (LBB) has released the 2019 Quality Assurance Team Annual Report. In the report, the LBB highlighted best practices to be considered by state agencies:
- Best practices to be considered by state agencies
- divide large projects into smaller, more manageable projects with schedules of less than 28 months and budgets of less than $10.0 million. For large legacy-replacement projects, consider strategies to migrate the legacy system incrementally by gradually replacing specific pieces of functionality with new applications and services;
- allocate adequate time to identify project requirements, prepare for procurement activities with vendors, and perform user-acceptance testing;
- engage the DCS team before posting a solicitation to include appropriate solicitation language asking vendors to offer a solution option that is hosted in a State Data Center; provide for better long-term network planning; and consult on DCS exemptions from the State Data Center if necessary;
- consider the use of open source software for less reliance on proprietary software; open source software does not charge users a licensing fee for modifying or redistributing its source code; publicly available source code enables continuous and broad peer review, promoting increased transparency and greater accountability3 ;
- couple agile development with user-centered design to enable the development team continuously to iterate toward solving and meeting the needs of end users4 ; a culture shift is required across the organization to successfully implement agile development.
- build IT systems using loosely coupled parts, connected by open and available Application Programming Interface (API) to enable flexible, sustainable systems that meet user needs and cost less over time
- include security planning in the initiation phase of the project and include code review, vulnerability testing and scanning throughout the project’s life cycle; conduct a penetration test of the application and remediate findings before moving to production; develop methods to quantify major information resources project benefits;
- engage an independent verification and validation company for projects valued at greater than $10.0 million to help oversee complex projects; agency budgets should accommodate the estimated cost;
- retain original estimates regarding scope and defer new requirements and functionality to a new project or phase at a later time;
- develop a phase gate process that requires acceptance of the system test deliverable, that is, remediation of all severity 1 and severity 2 system test defects and correction of any performance-testing deficiencies, before the project proceeds to the user-acceptance testing phase;
- include network performance and capacity planning as part of project scope, particularly when new types of data (e.g., electronic images of customer files) are sent to field offices as a result of the project;
- consider agile procurement for procurements that have a moderate level of uncertainty and complexity; Agile procurement is a procurement method that embraces change and enables the procurement to be divided into a series of manageable iterative stages, from developing the solicitation in a series of sprints to having a series of vendor demonstrations and discussions throughout the procurement phase;6 and
- divide large, monolithic contracts into shorter-term, lower-dollar-amount contracts through modular contracting. With the use of modular contracting an agency decreases project risk and incentivizes contractor performance while meeting the agency’s need for timely access to rapidly changing technology. Executing a six to twelve-month contract is likely to carry less risk than a six-year contract that could result in substandard product delivery and be difficult to terminate even at midpoint in the project.7 By means of modular contracting, the resulting contract language should enable modular product delivery that includes user-centered modules that can be remediated without jeopardizing the success of the entire project.
