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18F / its70-fs-epermit-scale-up

Solicitation for Schedule 70 vendors to support the U.S. Forest Service ePermit app
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Requirement to submit (open) source code repositories as part of the evaluation process #14

Open td-variq opened 6 years ago

td-variq commented 6 years ago

Question/Comment on the Forest Service RFP

Name and affiliation

Thomas Delrue, Lead Software Architect, VariQ Corporation

Section of RFP documents

5.1.1.3 Similar experience - code repository submission (as part of 5.1.1 Technical quote)

Question/Comment

We commend the F18's commitment to transparency and the use of open source-code tools and repositories. However, as a practical concern, the requirement to submit source code repositories as part of the evaluation process may limit, even prohibit, the participation of a number of qualified vendors. In our particular case, we'd love to share our experience migrating a major DHS USCIS enterprise system to AWS and re-platforming it to an open source tool set using a DevOps delivery approach, but due to DHS security constraints we are unable to share that repository and others like it. This limitation will be imposed on just about any other vendor with contracts with federal/local government agencies, financial services, and a host of other industries guarding their intellectual property.

hannahkane commented 6 years ago

We believe strongly that determining a vendor’s ability to deliver source code is by evaluating source code that they have produced directly. We find that reviewing repositories as part of the evaluation allows us to conduct those evaluations efficiently, effectively and understand the capabilities of potential vendors.

We recognize that many source code repositories aren’t open-source. In those cases, we’d suggest requesting private access for our team to review.

As a reminder, the code repositories do not need to be from government projects.

btrenkova commented 6 years ago

I appreciate the time to took to answer! I am afraid that 100% of our development work is on government (mostly DHS) projects - access to source code is strictly regulated and we cannot share externally. It is sad that our strength and competency for serving government clients is becoming a disqualifying factor in this case.