18F Blog

Large software systems are hard, and in government we're tasked with building large systems to manage complex benefits and processes. Often those mandates arrive on the back of a failing legacy system. An agile workflow has the benefit of allowing us to try out our ideas before committing to years of time and money.

Mark Hopson joined 18F in January, 2016 after working as a Contracting Officer at the Census Bureau. He works for the TTS Office of Acquisitions on call orders for the Agile BPA, procurement strategy, and other projects that are helping advance the way that government buys technology.

Cameron Dixon at the Department of Homeland Security writes for 18F: To facilitate secure connections for citizens, immigrants, and other users, the Department of Homeland Security began delivering 'HTTPS Reports' directly to federal agencies. We open-sourced the tool we scan with, in collaboration with our colleagues at 18F.

The Wage and Hour Division (WHD) of the U.S. Department of Labor has been with 18F at the forefront of digital transformation and has been an outstanding early adopter. One of our latest initiatives has been an Agile Delivery Services Blanket Purchase Agreement (Agile BPA) Task Order to create the initial version of a web application tool for the Section 14(c) certificate application process.

The White House HTTPS policy generated significant HTTPS adoption in the U.S. government. HTTPS is now used for most web requests to executive branch .gov websites, and the government now outpaces the private sector on HTTPS.