Developing corporate services in an agile environment

DoD represents an environment of continuously changing mission requirements that requires our Information Systems to adapt to accomplish new tasks, quicker, in a more efficient manner. Agility is the only way we will be able to keep up with this change. But there are subtleties that must be considered as we adopt various agile methods: secure, protect, control and authenticate are all elements needed to posture our Information Technology systems to counteract the real and perceived threats in today´s environment. Many systems have been tasked to ingest process and analyze different data sets than they were originally designed for and they have to interact with multiple new systems that were unaccounted for at design time. Leveraging the tenets of security, we have devised a new framework that takes agility into a new realm where the product will built to work in a service-based environment but is developed using agile processes. Even though these two criteria promise to hone the development effort, they actually contradict each other in philosophy where Services require stable interfaces, while Agile focuses on being flexible and tolerate changes up to much later stages of development. This framework is focused on enabling a successful product development that capitalizes on both philosophies.