2019-09-09 OSS4ITS Kickoff Meeting

Introductions

• Kickoff Meeting for OSS4ITS

• Contract specific instructions

  • Randy and Jeremiah will provide

• Outcomes

  • Consensus on how to access and implement standing operation procedures

  • Agreement and shared understanding of the project vision

    • Including minor clarifications that came from proposal discussions.

Contract Requirements and Reminders

Jeremiah

• Only an FHWA CO has the authority to change a task order.

  • Randy is the COR and will run through day to day issues but does not have the authority to change task orders.

• If anyone hears something that doesn’t match the contract language or the IDIQ, they should reach out to Jeremiah for clarification.

• Changes:

  • It’s a time and material task order. With STOL work, we will be adding year 6 rates into task orders. The intent was to put all of the labor categories in the STOL into the task order.

  • There is no need to clarify, the FHWA side will take care of year six rates. The FHWA will try to keep track of mods that are going to need to be made.

• COR has the ability to authorize all domestic travel on the contract.

  • International travel is different. Any international trips require written permission from the CO.

• Burn Rate

  • CO office is concerned about burn rate surrounding quality with the new open labor categories. If they see something occur, the conversation will be brought up quickly in order to avoid it becoming an issue.

Randy

• We are here to look at things technically.

  • Deb and Randy are keeping an eye on things including inspection and acceptance of deliverables.

  • CRG - Any documents being developed need to be in compliance with the CRG.

ITS JPO Data Program Overview and DOT Project Team

Ariel

• This is being funded out of ITS JPO.

  • Goal is to cultivate a learn-by-doing approach to best practices around data and software development.

  • Foundation for agility is the broader goal of the program. They can’t intervene in every project, but they can show people how to be agile and use best practices.

  • They are officially designated as a center for excellence.

  • As we work on this project, people need to be aware that this is being looked at as a model across the entire department.

  • Working to have open development practices be the default.

• Working on guidance on agile development that’s going out to the entire FHWA and OSS4ITS is being referred to as an example.

• ITS JPO has a data program confluence space.

  • Project teams are expected to establish and utilize a collaborative tool-set and approach to managing the project within a week of kickoff.

  • PM’s need to be aware of the resources in the data program confluence space.

Deb

• It’s important that we stress that OSS4ITS is under a microscope and this is the opportunity to prove that everything we’re working towards does work in the transportation environment.

• All deliverables need to be approved by the COR after review by Deb and shared with the team.

  • While Randy officially accepts the deliverables, he counts on Deb and the team to provide him with guidance on whether to accept or reject them. In the interest of openness and transparency, there is no reason to hold back on these deliverables.

Sudhakar

• Most deliverables will be soft deliverables sent online through Confluence or email.

Team

• Contractual issues to Randy - or escalated to Jeremiah

• Deb Curtis - GTM

• Ariel Gold - Program Manager

• Taylor Lochrane - CARMA

• Brian Brotsos - Chief Data Officer

• Sam Toma - Volpe

• Alexis Zubrow - Volpe

OSS4ITS falls under open source and agile development in the data support team hierarchy.

Project Vision

Deb

• We are trying to promote deployment by making sure all of the pieces fit together. Not only with the 4 current pieces, but also within the existing ecosystem that is corridors. The goal is to ensure that there is no roadblock for IOOs because of software not working with their current infrastructure.

  • Promoting deployment through Interoperability.

  • In an open-source environment that fosters giving back.

  • Making sure that everything works together and it is what people need.

Project Milestones

• A number of these things are already underway and are being refined in the kickoff meeting.

• We will be establishing a 2 week sprint cycle and updating these documents as needed during each sprint. This will include a monthly backlog snapshot for Ariel, details to be refined separately.

• Deliverables have concrete dates written into the contract, not all Milestones are Deliverables and are flexible with Leidos PM and Federal GTM approval.

  • Chris: Our protocol is to run deliverables by Randy if they need to be flexed.

    • Certain deliverables will need to do that, but generally they can be moved around within the agile process.

• Sudhakar has been tracking contract deliverables and they line up with his expectations.

ODE Java Issue

• ODE Work

  • ODE is slightly different than V2X Hub and CARMA in that it’s more than an OSS4ITS integration. There are components of maintaining ODE as well.

    • After back and forth about LOE in contract negotiations, the DOT mandated the responsibility would be maintaining code and doing minor bug fixes and that ODE development work would be limited to “making it fit within the new architecture we are defining.”

    • FHWA had first call with Brian relating to an issue that has arisen with ODE and it appears that there is an issue with the current Java version 8, which is deprecated software, that prevents many people from using it.

      • Sudhakar has looked over it and the continuous integration delivery process has an issue with Java. One of the solutions we have discussion is to move to the open version being supported by the open consortium as it will continue to be supported for the next several years.

      • Sudhakar is concerned that issues like this can very quickly eat away the hours allocated for ODE.

    • The primary goal is to ensure that Leidos has taken away the monitoring of the ODE repository and has a defined process for responding to bugs that is agreed upon between Deb and Leidos even if it gets modified later. There is a Booz system that can be adopted or Leidos can implement their own.

      • Brian made Sudhakar the admin on the ODE repository and Leidos will be taking over monitoring as of 9/9.

      • We have a very temporary fix to get Wyoming back on line prior to the discussion about ODE time allocation.

        • Sudhakar is going to go through the repository and make it consistent with CARMA and V2X Hub.

    • Sudhakar would still like to have an official transition from ODE in order to do a formal handoff of documentation.

      • It is likely that this transition will be between FHWA and Leidos as Booz has been out of ODE for a month.

• At the time that Booz Allen stopped working on ODE they were in compliance with the ITS JPO performance and quality standards. Leidos will need to familiarize themselves quickly and find out when they will need to responsible for meeting that threshold.

  • Ariel suggested 4 weeks from award as a good deadline for meeting the threshold.

Point of Contact

Deb

• When we started talking about having a single user interface, we discussed a single point of contact for all the different pieces so the community could go to one person with questions about any piece of OSS4ITS.

  • Task Order 20 was discussed as a potential option.

  • We have setup a DOT email as a stop gap to give us a single point of contact.

• A single interface to the software is a different piece than a single interface with the project. This has led to ambiguity in the goal of OSS4ITS.

  • Deb’s interpretation is that single interface means a single message that can communication with OSS4ITS regardless of which of the four pieces you’re working with.

Ariel

• We had talked about reaching back out to February workshop attendees.

  • Ariel thinks that will be important for validating our project direction.

Sudhakar

• Task 2.1 Collaborating with other product teams to come up with common backlogs and epics

  • Sudhakar has created an example architecture that shows how all the different messages will be communicating as an example. There will be brainstorming sessions to work through these architectures.

  • The other idea for a single point of contact. In addition to the TO20 phone line and the email, we have already started working on an OSS4ITS Confluence for all this documentation to reside including various GitHub repositories.

    • Because we are integrating 4 projects into a single system, that sort of consistency is hugely important to make sure that everybody understands that while the components are being developed on their own, they’re part of the larger OSS4ITS.

    • We want to avoid duplicating efforts and the common Confluence page will prevent that.

• Task 3.1 High level common architecture for minimum viable product

  • Due date is in February which aligns with Sam’s expectations.

• Task 4.1 ODE

  • This has been discussed. Our goal is going to be to solve tickets and GitHub issues and make sure continuing delivery happens to avoid holding up deployers.

  • Initial year our effort is to review ODE and come up with the architecture.

    • We will likely need to recommend changes in order to bring it in line with the other projects.

    • Sudhakar doesn’t believe we’ll be making any code changes in the first year.

• ODE Processes

  • We need a process for checking for issues in the repository

  • A process for getting to 90% for the JPO requirements

  • Handoff with Brian