EPA Office of Environmental Information (OEI) – Booz Allen Digital– Prototype: TREEView

Development:

https://github.com/booz-allen-epa-agile-rfi/epa-rfi

Prototype Overview

Development Branch Server: http://dev.treeview.io:9000

Staging Branch Server: http://staging.treeview.io:9000

Master Branch Server: http://www.treeview.io:9000

TREEView is a data-driven platform with the goal of helping the user discover where chemical emissions are coming from in their local community using the latest information from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory. Through TREEView, a concerned citizen is able to filter through EPA information by chemical type, related health effects, and facilities to provide the data in a way that meets an individual need.

Booz Allen Digital offers key strengths to the EPA OEI:

Demonstrated Agile Delivery – Our firm has strong experience with agile software development as demonstrated on this prototype as well as on GSA Integrated Award Environment (IAE), GSA 18F, numerous hackathons, and many other federal and commercial engagements. For this engagement, we were able to pull together an agile team across three time zones and demonstrate a distributed DevOps approach, which can decrease time and cost for delivery to the government.
A Culture of Innovation - Booz Allen's dedication to creating a culture of innovation resulted in the Strategic Innovation Group (SIG), a 1,800 person division whose mission it is to ensure there is focus on agile, digital, next gen analytics and cyber security for modern solutions.
Cross-functional agile skilled staff with reach back to domain SME – Booz Allen was able to quickly assemble a highly-skilled, cross-functional team for this effort. Booz Allen has deep knowledge of federal agencies missions and a staff embedded with the EPA OEI.

Digital Services Playbook

We followed the Digital Services playbook guidelines as detailed in the link below:

https://github.com/booz-allen-epa-agile-rfi/epa-rfi/blob/master/documentation/U.S.-Digital-Services-Playbook-Evidence.md

Technical Approach

We assigned one leader, our Product Owner (PO), who had responsibility for the quality of our TREEView prototype submission. We first took specific categories from the TRI Data Plus files for 2012-2014 (link: http://www.epa.gov/toxics-release-inventory-tri-program/tri-basic-plus-data-files-calendar-years-1987-2014) detailing chemical, facility name and location, and release type to create the data table for the application. Additional data tables from EPA (link: http://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/documents/hazard_categories.pdf and http://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-03/documents/osha_carcinogen_basis_march_2015_0.pdf) were matched to the main TRI data set to analyze health effects.

(a) User-Centered Design

From the beginning of our prototype development, we included ‘people’ throughout the process to understand their needs and get their feedback on our design and development. An overview of our lean HCD process:

https://github.com/booz-allen-epa-agile-rfi/epa-rfi/blob/master/documentation/Human-Centered-Design.md

(b) DevOps Approach

We took a DevOps approach to the workflow for this prototype:

https://github.com/booz-allen-epa-agile-rfi/epa-rfi/blob/master/documentation/DevOps-Process.md

(c) Agile Software Development

We developed TREEView using our iterative agile process:

https://github.com/booz-allen-epa-agile-rfi/epa-rfi/blob/master/documentation/Agile-Artifacts.md

(d) Agile Architecture

We only used open source technologies and open sourced our TREEView prototype.

https://github.com/booz-allen-epa-agile-rfi/epa-rfi/blob/master/documentation/Architecture-Diagrams.md

Licenses for open source technologies:

https://github.com/booz-allen-epa-agile-rfi/epa-rfi/blob/master/documentation/Licenses.md