DevOps and Software Development - Request for Information

Reference/Notice Number (if applicable): RFI-TTB-24-058
Project Title / Short Description: DevOps and Software Development Services (DO-SDS)
PSC code: DA01
NAICS Code: 541512
Release Date: February 21, 2024
Response Date: March 7, 2024

Primary Point of Contact: CT/MH RFI-TTB-24-058
Contact Information for Primary Point of Contact: purchasing@fiscal.treasury.gov
Secondary Point of Contact (optional): None.

Description :
This is a Small Business Sources Sought notice (hereinafter Notice). This is NOT a solicitation for proposals, proposal abstracts, request for bids or quotations, nor a promise to issue a solicitation in the future. The purpose of this notice is to obtain information regarding the availability and capability of qualified small business sources (e.g. HUBZone small business; service-disabled veteran-owned small business (SDVOSB); 8(a) small business; veteran-owned small business; woman-owned small business (WOSB), including economically disadvantaged women-owned small business (EDWOSB) or small disadvantaged business concerns) for this potential requirement.

Additionally, responses to this Notice will assist the Government in determining whether or not a set-aside is possible.

To qualify as a small business the NAICS code for this Notice is 541512 with a size standard of $34.0M. An organization that is not considered a small business under the applicable NAICS code should not submit a response to this Notice.

Detail Statements:

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau's (TTB) mission is to collect alcohol, tobacco, firearms and ammunition excise taxes, to ensure that alcoholic beverages are labeled, advertised and marketed in accordance with the law, and to administer the laws and regulations in a manner that protects the revenue, protects the consumer, and promotes voluntary compliance. TTB protects the public by enforcing the provisions of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) and the Federal Alcohol Administration Act (FAA Act) to ensure that only qualified persons engage in the alcohol industry. TTB is responsible for enforcing the laws regulating alcohol production, importation, and wholesale businesses; tobacco manufacturing and importing businesses; and alcohol labeling and advertising. TTB has two major locations at TTB's Headquarters Offices (HQ) in Washington, D.C. and the National Revenue Center (NRC) in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Bureau also provides support out of two laboratories and several Field Offices in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

TTB has interest in and is seeking small business vendors or Contractor capable of providing Agile development, maintenance, security, and operational support of TTB's new and existing business applications and systems where the end-to-end support is performed by the individual product development team(s). The Contractor shall support TTB with the need for Agile delivery services, including information technology (IT) management and governance, business process analysis, Agile solution architecture and design, Agile application development and configuration, database and server management, integration, and DevOps (On-Premises) for the mission enabling applications with the goal of migration to CloudOps/Cloud-Based DevOps in the near future.

The current award number is 20341420F00043 written against NITAAC CIO-SP3 contract 75N98119D00087 with Octo Metric, LLC with a period of performance of 07/01/2020 through 06/30/2025, inclusive of base period and five (5) option periods.

The Contractor shall provide a wide range of software development, software maintenance, and system operations services consistent with TTB's Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Handbook, Agile methodologies and the DevOps framework.

1. 1. Tasks

DO-SDS tasks fall under three main service areas: development of mission-enabling applications, operations and maintenance support for new and legacy applications (approximately 19 existing applications), and DevOps subject matter expertise and engineering services.

1. Development of Mission Enabling Applications Service Area
   1. Conduct Business Requirements Gathering and Impact Assessments
      1. Development of requirements (i.e. user stories, epics, etc.) that meet the project's scope and objectives using consistent and repeatable process as defined by TTB's SDLC Handbook related to Agile methodology.
      2. Development of or updates to project requirements documentation as agreed upon by TTB and the Contractor.
      3. Demonstration of features implemented after each completed sprint.
      4. Delivery of End of Sprint Reports after each completed sprint.
      5. Development of a tracking mechanism for progress reporting.
      6. Creation and grooming of Product and Sprint Backlogs.
      7. Delivery of complete briefing presentation of highly technical contents and enterprise architecture applicable designs briefs for approval by the TTB Architecture Board.
   2. Design, Development, and Integration Service Area
      1. Collaboration with Product Owner and TTB stakeholders to capture, store and translate business and technical requirements into application components and configurable items.
      2. Conduct user research, surveying and/or testing to inform usability of designs and user experience (UX) strategies.
      3. Design and configuration of adaptable and easy to maintain applications based on configuration and data management best practices with a security first and cloud first approach.
      4. Delivery of Software Version Description (SVD) documentation containing installation instructions and deployment of the defined solution in TTB's non-production environments with the support of TTB's Infrastructure Services contractor teams.
      5. Delivery of comprehensive application design/development documentation and code demonstrating traceability to the business and technical requirements. The documentation shall include details about the user interface (UI)/form designs; business rules; data sources and data validation requirements; actual and planned workflow configurations; data standards and dictionaries; data mapping and data exchange/flow to-and-from different modules; metadata structures; application and database roles to support the solution; system interconnections and interfaces; and other settings and configurations required to support application delivery.
      6. Conduct automated and manual code reviews continuously to identify defects and resolve defects; and coordination with internal and/or external- TTB development and testing teams to resolve system-wide deficiencies.
   3. System Testing
      1. Delivery of automated and manual test cases that provide comprehensive coverage of the desired outcomes for the product delivered.
      2. Delivery of manual and automated test scripts.
      3. Delivery of Test Analysis Report.
      4. User Acceptance Testing (UAT) facilitation including creating test plans and tracking business and technical UAT activities.
   4. Development Team Production Deployment Support
      1. Delivery of Release documentation.
      2. Deployment of complete working products or per Agile, Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) agreed upon by TTB and the Contractor.
      3. Delivery of post deployment test results; and troubleshooting and bug fixes should any arise post deployment.
2. Operational Support for Mission Enabling Applications Service Area
   1. Software application and system performance monitoring.
   2. Software application maintenance and electronic interfaces support.
   3. Tiers II and III Mission Enabling Applications support.
   4. Training support and knowledge transfer.
   5. Development and test environment system administration.
   6. Database and application server management.
   7. DevOps Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline support.
   8. Incremental migration of DevOps to CloudOps or Cloud-Based DevOps, if feasible.
3. DevOps Subject Matter Expertise and Engineering Support Service Area
   1. Technical reviews and advisory.
   2. Technical expertise for procurement support.
   3. Technical debt monitoring and remediation.
   4. License tracking
   5. Agile solution architecture
   6. Data management
   7. Continual improvement
      
4. 1. Team Organization

TTB's DO-SDS support team organization scaled up from three (3) to eight (8) agile development teams to:

• Incrementally build myTTB using modern technologies and techniques; and incrementally replace legacy systems for permitting, labeling, formula submission/approval, etc. with new myTTB features.
• Run TTB's DevOps pipeline and the myTTB Infrastructure; and provide continuous integration and continuous delivery including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Operating System (OS) and database support.
• Perform operations and maintenance of legacy applications.

The following list is an example of the requisite roles for TTB's current DO-SDS support organization. It is important to note that TTB does not require an exact match to the team organizational structure listed below:

Permits (Agile Development Team):

• Scrum Master/Business Analyst
• Commercial off the shelf (COTS) Software Engineer (3) - Accela Land ManagementTM module of Accela Automation with Accela Citizen Access deployment
• Database Administrator

Tax (Agile Development Team):

• Scrum Master/Business Analyst
• Full Stack Software Engineer (3)
• .NET Software Engineer
• Tech Automation Engineer

Regulatory (Alcohol Labeling and Formulation Agile Development Team):

• Scrum Master
• Full Stack Software Engineer (4)
• Business Analyst
• Tech Automation Engineer

myTTB 1 (Agile Development Team):

• Scrum Master
• Full Stack Software Engineer (4)
• Business Analyst
• Test Automation Engineer

myTTB 2 (Agile Development Team):

• Scrum Master
• Full Stack Software Engineer (2
• Business Analyst
• Test Automation Engineer

myTTB 3 (Agile Development Team):

• Scrum Master
• Full Stack Software Engineer (4)
• Business Analyst
• Test Automation Engineer

myTTB 4 (Agile Development Team):

• Scrum Master
• Full Stack Software Engineer (4)
• Business Analyst
• Test Automation Engineer

myTTB 5 (Agile Development Team):

• Scrum Master
• Full Stack Software Engineer (4)
• Business Analyst
• Test Automation Engineer

Customer Experience (CX)/UI/UX Team:

• UX Strategist (3)
• UX Designer (2)
• Business Analyst

Operations Team:

• Operations Manager
• Enterprise Database Architect
• Database Architect
• Database Administrator (2)
• System Administrator (2)
• Site Reliability Engineer

Site Reliability Team:

• DevOps Lead Engineer
• Site Reliability Engineer (6)

Requested Information:

Responses to this Notice should address the following:

1. Provide your company profile:

• Company name and address
• Company website (webpage URL)
• Company Cage Code
• Company's Unique Entity Identifier (UEI), as registered in the System for Award Management (SAM)
• Company's socio-economic status (e.g., Small, 8a SDB, VOSB, SDVOSB, WOSB, EDWOSB, HUBZone, Other)
• Technical point of contact name, email, and telephone number
• Administrative point of contact name, email, and telephone number
• Contract vehicles that your company currently holds that are applicable to this requirement
• Indicate whether your company is a CIO-SP3 contract holder (Yes/No)
• Indicate whether your company is a CIO-SP4 preliminary awardee (Yes/No). If yes, then under which socio-economic category? (If multiple, then list all categories)
• Affiliate information: parent company, joint venture partners, and potential teaming partners

1. Based on your experience with Agile development and delivery of MVPs, provide specific examples of challenges, mitigation strategies, and lessons learned from the process journey from project kick off to MVP release deployment. What were the key challenges that you faced and what changes did you make to reduce the chances of experiencing similar challenges on the next journey?
2. Provide examples of your experience using tools and capabilities to analyze system performance and test scalability to identify system failure modes and identify potential fixes. Describe automations used that minimize customer involvement to implement.
3. Provide your experience and tools used to monitor system health, security, performance, incident management, analysis to increase all customer devices and systems availability in an on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud, multiple vendor software as a service (SaaS) environment. Identify and guide stakeholders to identify and solve systems, application, tools technical issues.
4. Provide specific examples of cloud migration and adoption strategies; and approaches TTB should consider for maximizing DevOps capabilities in an integrated environment. Briefly describe how you would recommend TTB mitigate the risks associated with cloud adoption. Specifically, state how the risk was defined, analyzed, and mitigated. How can TTB control unknown costs that may be associated with cloud adoption?
5. Provide experience with maturing a comprehensive change management program in a process diverse environment to include but not limited to DevOps; IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL); SDLC and Agile; configuration management; problem management and monitoring/alerting. Describe your experience in managing the number of changes daily, the type of changes, stakeholder communications, knowledge sharing, and how you improved the process.
6. Provide examples of scaling teams to keep pace with high velocity/continuous delivery product development initiatives of similar size/magnitude. Provide examples that demonstrate how these teams achieved enterprise agility and served as key enablers of innovation and business value. Describe the digital products/services delivered, the number of teams required, the length of time required for delivery. What was the organizational structure of these teams, what methods did you utilize to ensure the teams were appropriately staffed with the right personnel and when necessary, how did you appropriately shift resources among teams for maximum synergy and productivity?
7. TTB anticipates a cost reimbursement contract with incentives. For example, TTB has used cost plus fixed fee/award fee and cost-plus fixed fee/award term contracts in the past. What incentives would motivate you and why?

How to Submit a Response.

The point of contact for this Notice is:

purchasing@fiscal.treasury.gov

Email responses to this Notice shall be sent to the attention of individual(s) listed in this Notice.

Due date and time for responses is March 7, 2024, at 3:00 PM ET.

Responses should be limited to 10 pages; and the file format and type should be the following:

• Microsoft Word 2007 or above
• Spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel 2007 or above
• Main Text: Arial, font size 11
• Table/Figure: Arial, no smaller than font size 9
• Table/Figure title: Arial, no smaller than font size 9
• Margins: Top, bottom, right, and left: No smaller than .75
• Header and footer shall fall within the .75 margin and contain the date, page number, and company name.
• Page size: Letter, 8.5 x11

Terms and Conditions regarding this Notice:

This Notice does not obligate the Government to award a contract or otherwise pay for the information provided in response. All costs associated with responding to this Notice are solely at the responding party's expense. The Government reserves the right to use information provided by respondents for any purpose deemed necessary and legally appropriate. Further, the Government may contact the vendor for additional information regarding the information submitted as part of this market research effort. Any organization responding to this notice should ensure that its response is complete and sufficiently detailed to allow the Government to determine the organization's qualifications to perform the work. Respondents are advised that the Government is under no obligation to acknowledge receipt of the information received or provide feedback to respondents with respect to any information submitted. After a review of the responses received, a pre-solicitation synopsis and solicitation may be published in the Government Point of Entry or other similar source (GSA e-Buy). However, responses to this notice will not be considered adequate responses to a solicitation.

Responses to this notice are not offers and cannot be accepted by the Government to form a binding contract or agreement. The Government will not be obligated to pursue any particular acquisition alternative as a result of this notice. Responses to the notice will not be returned. Not responding to this notice does not preclude participation in any future solicitation if one is issued.

No proprietary, classified, confidential, or sensitive information should be included in responses to this Notice, unless otherwise appropriately marked by the Respondent. The Government reserves the right to use any non-proprietary technical information received in response to this Notice in any resultant solicitation(s).

Do Not Submit any Proposals/Offers in response to this Notice.

Place of Contract Performance: Primary place of performance will be the Contractor's site; however, some contractor personnel may have the Government site as their principal place of performance.