February 13, 2012 — This week on Federal Tech Talk, Host John Gilroy is joined by Greystones Group CEO Sheila Duffy and Director of Technology Services Mary-Sara Camerino.

Most listeners are familiar with Vivek Kundra’s 25 initaitives for reducing cost of federal IT. Two of these concepts are agile software development and using open source software.

On today’s show Duffy and Camerino explain both from a very practical perspective.

There are many ways to describe agile software development with names like Xtreme Programming, Lean, and a popular method is called “Scrum.”

Camerino describes how federal projects can take advantage of the segmented approach of Scrum, these short “chunks” of code are called “Sprints.” She says that these short bursts of code allow end users to give input during the process rather than at the end.

Today, even people in acquisition understand how to structure projects using flexible software development.

Duffy expands upon the value of open source.

Not to be confused with open government, open source software is software that has no user license.

Greystones uses an open source platform called “Drupal” to help federal IT projects. During the interview Duffy talks about the flexibility and savings that Drupal affords the accounts they handle.

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