TTS DevTools is a program in GSA's Technology Transformation Services with a mission to dramatically reduce the burden of starting and maintaining digital services in government.
What burden you ask?
- The burden of missing the tools and "factory floor" to collaboratively work, secure, and deploy code.
- The burden of having a wide, overlapping, and hard to reason with set of minimum requirements to meet for even the most basic public facing web site.
- The burden of a compliance process centered on massive documents and spreadsheets, living outside of where the digital service teams live.
In other words, the usual platform engineering concerns with an extra dose of regulation. Luckily, many of the services and components teams need already exist, including:
- cloud.gov PaaS to run and operate applications in a FISMA Moderate setting
- Login.gov to provide authentication and identity services to the full scope of the public
- USWDS to provide a consistent and high quality design system to make sites look good, behave well, and support the broadest range of users
While the program started as a project of 18F and evolved into a full program in 2023, the problems DevTools works to solve are hardly new. What was new was having a team focused on improving efficiency for the end to end secure software development life cycle.