DISA’S NEXT STEP IN COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IS PROJECTFORGE.MIL

Arlington, Va. - The Defense Department's newest collaborative software development tool just entered limited operating availability capacity for individual DoD projects or programs. ProjectForge is the newest offering in the Defense Information Systems Agency’s family of services enabling continuous collaboration among DoD software developers, testers, certifiers, operators, and users. Its private project portals expand on SoftwareForge’s capabilities in hosting public projects for software reuse and collaborative development.

“ProjectForge is the next logical step in the Forge.mil program that’s surpassed all expectations,” said Rob Veitmeyer, DISA’s Forge.mil program manager. “It was time to address the needs of software developers looking for application lifecycle management tools but who aren’t developing open source software, and ProjectForge is the perfect vehicle,” he added.

Broader in scope yet complementary to SoftwareForge, ProjectForge is one of DISA's On-Demand cloud computing services designed to reduce the time and costs that software development projects typically face in creating their own software development environment as well as deliver enhanced capability over those available from stand alone development tools. It’s a fee-for-service capability that will be delivered on-demand by DISA Computing Services and hosted in a Defense Enterprise Computing Center.

Forge.mil enables collaborative software development and cross-program sharing of software, system components, and services in support of net-centric operations and warfare. It will ultimately comprise five components that include SoftwareForge and ProjectForge: CertificationForge, which will support agile certification; StandardsForge, which will drive collaborative standards development; and TestForge, to provide on-demand software testing tools. Forge.mil’s won Information Week’s 2009 Government Innovators Award and Government Computer News’ Great dot-gov Web Sites 2009.

With more than 4,000 registered users on 170 hosted projects and over 500 software releases available for download, Forge.mil has also been granted Authority to Operate on SIPRNet, DoD’s classified version of the civilian Internet and is available on NIPRNet, DoD’s unclassified Internet. It’s available to the U.S. military, DoD government civilians, and DoD contractors for new and existing projects, enabling the organizations to save money, improve software development efficiency, and drive collaboration that helps deliver better software faster to the warfighter. To register or host a project on Forge.mil, visit http://www.disa.mil/forge. You can also follow it on Twitter at @ForgeMil.

DISA, a Combat Support Agency, engineers and provides command and control capabilities and enterprise infrastructure to continuously operate and assure a global net-centric enterprise in direct support to joint warfighters, National level leaders, and other mission and coalition partners across the full spectrum of operations. We are leaders enabling information dominance in defense of our Nation.