18F Blog

To folks new to government, one of the most surprising differences between our work and work in the private sector are the barriers in accessing commercially available software, and commercially available Software as a Service (SaaS) in particular. There are many good reasons for these barriers but digital teams need great tools to get work done and compliance requires tradeoffs associated with time to initial delivery and accommodation of constraints that are different from the private sector.

We’re delighted to announce that cloud.gov is now FedRAMP Authorized, which enables agencies to quickly transition their web-based services to efficient and easy-to-use cloud hosting. FedRAMP Authorized status marks completion of a comprehensive security and compliance assessment that enables federal agencies to start using cloud.gov with significantly reduced effort. cloud.gov is a government-customized hosting platform that takes care of technical infrastructure and security compliance requirements.

In September, our Operations team was authorized for a limited amount of overtime during the fiscal year crunch. The team needed the extra hours, but like many others in America, it always feels like we need 50 hours a week to get everything done. Once we were in the fiscal new year, we decided to determine how accurate our perception of not having enough time to get everything done truly was. So the team did something interesting.

A key part of agile development is constantly shipping new features. With so many changes happening to the product, it can be hard to keep track of how the product is growing and improving. Release notes help keep everyone on the team in the know about what’s shipping, give a clear list of features to check, and help always frame our work in terms of the value it delivers to users.