© SAIC. All rights reserved.

SAIC DevOps Accelerating application development and delivery

© SAIC. All rights reserved.

SAIC DevOps Accelerating application development and delivery

Federal agencies are adopting Agile and DevOps software development as part of their digital transformation journeys. However, they must contend with legacy systems, non-standardized IT environments, and entrenched cultures. SAIC offers a portfolio of DevOps services and solutions that helps customers overcome these challenges and embrace automation and cloud services.

Overview DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that emphasizes increased collaboration and integration between software development teams and data center operations groups.

The goal of DevOps is to deliver working, high-quality, and secure applications to the enterprise more quickly and frequently. DevOps aims for shorter development cycles, more reliable releases, and higher deployment frequencies. It encourages collaboration and advocates increased automation at all steps of the software development life cycle (SDLC).

We recognize that for DevOps to work successfully, organizations need to embrace cultural transformation. From our years of experience in helping large organizations with change adoption, we have harvested a repeatable change management process based on academic research and practical knowledge. The process provides consistent and effective results with lower risk for customers.

SAIC DevOps takes a lean approach to driving productivity and efficiency, by automating the customer’s software delivery pipeline. Our fully automated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines use purpose-built, open-source, and market-leading commercial tool stacks.

SAIC has embraced DevOps as an enabling capability in our own organization. Through cultural, organizational, and technical innovations, we help customers transform their SDLCs for speed, agility, and cost savings.

Tools and Technologies SAIC DevOps leverages technology in the pipeline wherever possible to streamline delivery and minimize human error, resulting in higher productivity, consistency, and performance. This includes test automation tools that support test-driven development, as well as containerization techniques that enable pipeline automation and use of stateless designs plus identical development environments and stacks for developers to work with.

SAIC has invested a significant amount of internal resources toward researching, prototyping, and integrating the best tools and techniques for test and release automation in cloud-based DevOps. These investments have resulted in optimized, pre-engineered templates that utilize infrastructure as a service, infrastructure as code, and platform as a service. We are able to pass implementation cost savings to customers.

We work closely with each customer to identify the tools and technologies that best fit its IT strategy and goals. We have strong strategic alliances with leading DevOps tool vendors and work closely with them to down-select a customer solution that meets strategic objectives and technical requirements while optimizing implementation and O&M costs.

SAIC combines deep understanding of customer missions and technical expertise with cloud platforms, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, to stand up effective cloud-based DevOps environments. Our DevOps transformation solutions and services cover all stages from strategy, to implementation, to operations.

© SAIC. All rights reserved.

SAIC DevOps Accelerating application development and delivery

The SAIC Difference SAIC has embraced DevOps as an enabling capability in our own organization and is committed to bringing DevOps’ benefits and value to customers. We have successfully implemented DevOps environments for a range of federal agencies by tailoring our repeatable approach to meet their unique challenges and opportunities. Our DevOps Maturity Model helps organizations assess their readiness for DevOps and provides a roadmap for adoption. We evaluate them on a scale for agility, automation, measurement, leadership, and culture.

Federal Client Examples

Agency 1 Agency 2 Agency 3 Agency 4 SAIC jointly developed with the customer a unique software development life cycle incorporating Agile and DevOps with integrated security. We improved the agency’s time to market by nearly 1,200 percent and reduced the deployment process by 75 percent. Applications were more than 85 percent on time and on function, and application maintenance costs were lowered by 30 percent, while we decreased production defects by 66 percent.

SAIC used DevOps concepts to increase the customer’s application stack from 20 to more than 80 applications and services. We also increased the number of enterprise service bus integrations by 25 percent and grew mobile platform use by 1,000 percent. We incorporated elements of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) into operational practices, leveraging weekly functional/technical forums to manage organizational resources across all product development streams.

SAIC supported the transition to Agile development and operations — an effort that encompassed more than 80 Agile teams from multiple contractors. We managed an Agile release readiness review process for approximately 100 applications and streamlined it to increase the focus on test results and implementation plans. This resulted in an 85 percent improvement in throughput of Agile reviews with no impact on risk and quality.

SAIC developed a solution using approximately 3 terabytes (TB) of vessel traffic data and Hadoop and ESRI tools to develop complex geospatial and temporal analyses. SAIC matured the customer’s big data framework using AWS infrastructure services such as scalable storage and compute, low-cost compute, load balancing and failover services, and managed container service and API provisioning.

Summary

SAIC helps organizations adopt DevOps development environments and cultures through the combination of ingenuity, a repeatable approach with highly collaborative and customizable frameworks, and best-in-class technologies for converging software development, quality assurance/test, and IT operations into seamless and cohesive teams.

Our approach removes barriers between all stakeholders in software development and IT operations and promotes daily interaction with the customer and its end users. SAIC DevOps adds value for organizations just starting out on their DevOps journeys and seeking to automate deployment of application stacks in a single environment, for those looking to automate deployment as part of an integrated tool chain, and for those seeking to optimize public cloud-based or hybrid cloud-based software pipeline management.