Attention!
The content on this site is a materials pilot. It represents neither changes to existing policy nor pending new policies. THIS IS NOT OFFICIAL GUIDANCE.
Course overview
You’ve made it to the last set of lessons! Do a little dance.
| Health indicator | Topic |
| Procurement flexibility | Vendor management, one step removed |
| Iterative development | Constant vigilance! |
| Iterative development | Selecting open source |
| Admin | Course five - Report out |
What this course covers
In the fifth and final course, we’ll look at three subjects that paint a more nuanced picture of an ideal state for software projects — taking on vendors, monitoring system health, and using open source and resuable code as a gold standard for streamlined, repeatable processes.
Procurement flexibility - Vendor management, one step removed
What makes up a good contract between a vendor and a state? In this conversation, Princess Ojiaku and Carrie Feher talk about how to steer the vendor-state relationship toward a good place and how to get it back on track when it's not.
Ask team leads and contract owners how they monitor vendor budget.
- Bad: The state has little or no regular visibility into how the vendor is billing.
- Meh: The state has visibility into how the vendor is billing but is uncertain how to manage if a vendor is burning too hot.
- Good: The state has regular conversations with the vendor about burn rate.
Iterative development - Constant vigilance!
In the Harry Potter universe, "Mad Eye" Moody has a magical eyeball that can swivel around in his head to constantly watch in all directions. With software systems, we use the term monitoring to watch not only how our software is operating, but also how the servers provide that software, and how the network delivers the bits, and... and... and. In other words, excellent monitoring is constantly vigilant and we have tools that help us make sense of the deluge of data. This lesson broadly explores monitoring and speficially explores the importance of monitoring for security.
Ask how they monitor system health in production.
- Bad: The state can't tell you about the health of the system that's being used.
- Meh: The state manually monitors system health and creates reports on a regular basis.
- Good: System health is monitored automatically and staff can show you a reporting dashboard.
Iterative development - Selecting open source
Open source software is software for which the code is freely available, meaning that the code or the "source" is "open". Systems are built for the state with taxpayer dollars, so states should own and have access to the software they have paid for. This lesson is about how decisions are made in selecting software systems and provides examples of free and open software that you might keep your eyes open for.
Ask how development choices are made and if open source or reusable options are considered.
- Bad: The state can't tell you how they make/made their decisions.
- Meh: The state can tell you how they made their decisions, but did not consider open source options.
- Good: The state can show you how/why they make their decisions and are using open source when possible.