Integrated Personnel and Pay System-Army, a.k.a. IPPS-A, is working to speed up the development and delivery of software capabilities through the adoption of Agile best practices and is seeking industry support across the areas of automated testing, modular contracting and adaptive software architectures.
The Army said Friday IPPA-A leaders held a breakout session at AFCEA Belvoir Industry Days on May 14 and Lt. Col. Ryan Martin, product manager for IPPS-A Increment II, highlighted the importance of contracting practices to advance the Agile development model.
“If we are going to fully harness Agile software development, we have to change the business paradigm,” Martin said. “We can’t be locked into strict contractual requirements if we want to adjust on the fly.”
Col. Matthew Paul, IPPS-A project manager, said automated testing enables the service to accelerate software development without sacrificing the quality of code.
“We are also going to explore test-driven development. This new design pattern allows us to code a little and test a little. So, if we fail, we fail early, and we fail small,” Paul added.
During the event, Paul also stressed the importance of open application programming interfaces and data architectures.
“If we don’t modernize our data architecture, the data architecture is going to become the bottleneck. Programs will end up spending an inordinate amount of time doing backend data work and rework,” he added.
IPPS-A is part of the Army’s Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems.
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