Integrated Award Environment (IAE) Industry Community

IAE is using GitHub, a cloud-based software code repository, as the foundation for a future developer community.

Computer source code is at the heart of every software development project. For years, the federal government had developers manage their source code behind agency firewalls. The Integrated Award Environment (IAE) made the decision to use GitHub, a cloud-based software code version control system as its software code repository. Using GitHub prevents IAE developers from overwriting each other’s work, recover from errors, and share work easily.

GitHub first gained a following by the open source software movement, but now even United States government agencies are using GitHub because of the flexibility it offers developer communities.

Version Control with GitHub

GitHub was a natural choice for our version control needs because a growing number of GSA developers work off-site and remotely at least part of the work week. Further, the use of GitHub by the other agencies and the White House for public engagement demonstrated how IAE could succeed in its use.  Software code version control in the cloud helps support a distributed workforce equally and securely.

The open source software movement makes frequent use of GitHub for version control, which, in turn, makes it a natural choice for IAE’s version control needs.

GitHub also offers the best foundation for sharing source code and application programming interfaces (APIs) with the award management community.

Here are the benefits IAE is seeing with GitHub:

• Enables collaboration between the IAE in-house and contractor developers regardless of their geographic location

• Centralizes IAE code in a secure repository

• Provides the ability to undo changes to source code letting IAE developers “roll back” to a previous version of their code

• Enables IAE developers and management to document bugs and track issues

• Provides a multiple views over the IAE development team’s progress

The right configuration means that we can make building and testing code an automatic part of development

Outreach with GitHub

While the development team is reaping the benefits of GitHub internally, IAE is also growing the GitHub platform into a powerful outreach tool to reach software developers in the award management community. For example, software developers can review IAE architecture documentation residing on GitHub.

GitHub already has a large established developer community that uses it  as a source code repository and collaboration platform. An IAE presence on GitHub is a natural place for a source code repository amongst the millions of repositories already live on the platform.

As we move to a true open source model, we intend for our GitHub repository to a become one of the primary channels for our OpenIAE initiative.

GitHub and IAE

GitHub serves as both our source code repository and  a growing IAE developer community platform, making it an integral part of our technology strategy.

Please email iaeoutreach@gsa.gov with any questions about the role that GitHub plays in serving the IAE developer community.

Have you reviewed the IAE GitHub repository yet? Tell us in the comments.