Hanscom hosting Forge.mil Testing Services pilots

  • Published
  • By Chuck Paone
  • 66th Air Base Group Public Affairs
HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. --  An innovative, interactive online testing capability is receiving a needed boost with a pilot effort hosted by the Electronic Systems Center here.

The Testing Services component of the Defense Department's common software development environment, Forge.mil, has been championed and developed by ESC and contractors working for the center. It enables continuous testing of software as it's being developed.

Forge.mil, a Defense Information Services Agency-led effort with which ESC has had continuous involvement, picks up on the globally popular software development community model, popularized by Source Forge, which basically allows developers to collaborate in an open environment.

"With Forge.mil, the push is for the DoD to adopt some of the same tools and methods that industry uses to rapidly design, develop, test and field software," said Ray Smith of Jackpine Technologies, a contractor working within ESC's Capabilities Integration Directorate. "Following agile methodology, we're trying to go toward small, incremental, functioning software deliveries rather than a single monolithic one at the end of a contract."

Forge.mil is less open than Source Forge; a Common Access Card or External Certificate Authority login is required. However, it's still a major departure from old ways of doing business in that it enables developers to collaborate with other developers, users, mission assurance specialists and testers continuously while developing.

However, implementing this testing capability at one time across the entire DISA enterprise would require too much effort and expense, Mr. Smith said.

"It just makes more sense to host it in pockets, and we've set up the first pocket right here," he said. "We took a copy of it and are running it here in an ESC-based cloud." The cloud refers to a shared pool of compute resources (processing, memory, storage, etc.) that can be provisioned into systems as required by users.

"Delivering computing as a service rather than a product allows more efficient use of underlying hardware and consolidates much of the system administration tasks," said Mr. Smith. "Users no longer need to worry about which specific server is theirs in this utility-based model.

Because these ESC contractors used the Forge.mil government open source model to develop the ESC Test Forge component, ESC has been able to come along and reuse it locally, according to Peter Walsh, also a contractor with Jackpine Technologies who is working on the project within the Capabilities Integration Division at ESC.

"They can just check out the application from Forge.mil and deploy the code here at Hanscom," he said. He also noted that there are many other advantages.

"The software licenses can be shared and re-used in this environment, in same way we're sharing the hardware," he said. "It really is an enabler of great efficiencies. Even in lean budget times, when hardware and software testing budgets could be cut, programs can turn to this capability to make up for any loss."

One of the program teams that have begun working with this capability is the Distributed Common Ground System Multi-Service Execution Team Office, also known as the DMO. The DMO is responsible for data sharing and interoperability of certain types of intelligence across the military Services and the intelligence community.

"The DMO will be using ESC Test Forge to setup virtual nodes to simulate key intelligence sharing infrastructure, and to test new capabilities against that infrastructure," said DMO Director Lt. Col. Tom Tschuor. "Since each element of the intelligence community evolved independently, the ability to easily generate multiple different hardware and software configurations literally at the touch of a few mouse clicks will save hundreds of hours of labor each year."

Setting up a lab configuration, Colonel Tschuor points out, takes 30 minutes versus a full day to set up a standard test environment. "And no equipment ever needs to move."

"Through sharing test capabilities with other ESC programs, the DMO and other users will be able to take advantage of a large and very flexible test environment, without needing to maintain a large test footprint, saving tens of thousands of dollars a year," he said.

Program managers like Lt. Col. Tschuor are bringing money and resources to the table, which really helps fuel this sort of initiative. The win-win is that program managers ultimately save time and money, and come away with increased confidence.

"The Test Forge environment supports staging of capabilities to the live network. However, unlike current configurations, deployment isn't the time when all the surprises occur," said ESC's Chief Technology Officer Dr. Tim Rudolph. "Capability developers can therefore have higher confidence, right from the start, that applications and services will work end-to-end."

All of this represents "a game changing approach to better understanding the computing and network environment, in a very economical way," he said.

The great benefit of working in this collaborative environment is that it makes development truly iterative, Mr. Walsh said, noting that development, testing and refinement can now be done in a continuous loop.

"The bottom line is we're not just saying you should collaborate, but we're saying 'here's a tool to help you do it.'"