U.S Department of Veterans Affair

Glossary

 

These are terms VA Mobile App development stakeholders frequently use.

VA Acronym Search

Organizations

VA Mobile App development is a partnership that crosses several branches and organizations, including other Federal groups. This section identifies the primary groups.

WMS: Web and Mobile Solutions

The WMS:

  • Reports to the VA Mobile Applications Governance Board.
  • Maintains the inventory of all Mobile Apps and their status throughout the project life cycle using JIRA, an automated system that holds all of the relevant status information and artifacts for each Mobile App.
  • Maintains a relationship with the Product Owner, the Developer, and all Compliance Review bodies throughout the project life cycle.
  • Requires sustainment plans for each proposed or completed mobile application.
  • Builds and maintains this public Web site to provide developers with current VA development requirements.
  • Requires developers and Compliance Review bodies to maintain their respective data elements.
  • Tracks all Mobile Apps within the system with JIRA dashboards and filters for reporting.

OI&T: Office of Information and Technology

OI&T provides:

  • All security and application-performance-related Compliance approvals.
  • All Software Quality Assurance testing to ensure that the Mobile App is functionally sound.
  • The Mobile Device Manager (MDM) environment for internal application deployment. OI&T will execute the deployment process determined for each Application by the product owner.
  • The Mobile Application Environment (MAE) environment for development and testing of each Application.
  • Management of the entire Authority to Operate (ATO) process to move the application into production, with the assistance and participation of WMS and the Developer.
  • Deployment of Veteran-facing Apps through VA’s MDM or the device providers' App stores.

MAGB: Mobile Applications Governance Board

The VA Mobile Applications Governance Board’s role is to:

  • Review all such requests and approve or deny the use of VA resources to develop, certify, and deploy the application.
  • Prioritize the requests, ordering them as it believes will most benefit the VA and its constituents.
  • Be the final decision point to determine whether certification has been achieved, based on the certification process results presented to it by the WMS.

MAMT: Mobile Applications Management Team

The VA MAMT oversees the Mobile App Environment (MAE) architecture, resources, and maintenance.

MAE Change Control Board

The Change Control Board (CCB) approves changes to the MAE:

  • Development related changes: The changes to the non-production environments must be captured to ensure that testing that occurs in these other environments are performed in environments that are at least documented and relate to the production environments as closely as possible.
  • Production changes: Changes to development tools and the Health Adapter software also have to be approved so stakeholders are aware of the updates and can provide feedback if necessary.

Any changes requested through the CCB will require a review of what implications the changes will have on all elements of the project, including impacts to other concurrent tasks, milestones and dependencies. Changes will be prioritized and implemented based on priority order. These are decisions that need to be made by government officials with input from contractors to support the government processes.

If you have a MAE JIRA account you can view the instructions for requesting a change to the MAE. In a MAE wiki, search for:

MAE Change Control Procedure

V&V: Validation and Verification Team

V&V is part of OI&T's Product Development office. Product Development maintains a separate V&V team for VA Mobile App development.

Compliance Review Body

The Compliance Review Bodies are specialists in offices throughout VA that review Mobile Apps to ensure they are safe, secure, and meet VA's quality requirements. See About the VA App Compliance Review for more information.

Individual Roles

This section lists the common names and acronyms for the primary VA App teams' stakeholders. See Roles and Responsibilities Overview for more information.

Requestor

The Requester is the person or persons who submit a Request for a VA Mobile App.

Business Owner or Product Owner

The Product Owner, sometimes called the Business Owner, ensures a Mobile App project progresses through the Project Life cycle on time and meets its original business requirements.

PM: Project Manager

The Project Manager coordinates all of the activities for all of the Mobile App project stakeholders.

SME: Subject Matter Expert

The SME is a specialist in the field associated with the Mobile App.

Compliance Reviewer

The Compliance Reviewer is a specialist from one of the Compliance Bodies.

Documents

Business Owner Agreement

When an App Request passes initial screening, the Request's stakeholders submit a Business Owner Agreement that demonstrates a commitment to developing the App.

PMAS

Project Management Accounting System. PMAS maintains and publishes VA's development policies.

Terms

Project

Offices within VA have different meanings for the term Project. Here, we apply the term Project to indicate an individual App. The project-tracking software VA uses to track the development of a VA Apps (JIRA) applies the word Project to each individual App, and that is the prevailing use of the term for Apps developed by contracted developers and mobile Apps under development outside the Office of Information and Technology (OI&T). The VA packages Mobile Apps developed by parties outside the VA by contractors into groups of Apps, which move through the life cycle stages together.

PoC:

Point of Contact

SQA:

Software Quality Assurance

Health Adapter or HealthAdapter

The Mobile Health Platform (MHP) HealthAdapter is a middle-tier system designed to provide easy-to-consume, resource-oriented services, which are used while developing health care applications.

VAMF

The VA Mobile Framework (VAMF) provides the infrastructure to allow a standard architectural framework to host mobile Apps. It provides software services in the form of REST web services, which provide functions including authentication of users and retrieval and updating of data within VA. It provides an Internet accessible layer of services to isolate mobile applications from VA infrastructure and provide secure access to VA backend services. The VAMF security boundary includes all of the hardware and software infrastructure, including each mobile application deployed to that environment.

Stakeholder

A stakeholder is anyone involved in an App's development, management, or maintenance.

JIRA Terms

The MAE uses the latest version of the Atlassian JIRA project and bug tracker to maintain all of the activities for all mobile App development within the VA.

See: JIRA Glossary for general information.

Issue

Within VA's Mobile App Environment, an issue specifically refers to a JIRA item of these types:

  • Functional requirement (in Agile terminology, a Story).
  • Non-functional requirement: a task that has to occur at a particular stage in the life cycle, like a required document.

Wiki

The MAE makes extensive use of the Atlassian Confluence Wiki product as a staging area for all of the information you collect during the course of the App's development life cycle. VA uses the latest release. See: Confluence Documentation Directory to find the latest documentation.