Federal Communications Commission (FCC.GOV)
Agileana is exclusively responsible for the operations, maintenance, development, upgrade, modernization, testing, remediation, Section 508 compliance, FISMA compliance, quality assurance, regular status reporting, and project management of FCC.GOV. We are also responsible for the Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 migration, which is currently in process.
FCC.GOV is a read-only public facing site with a complex architecture that is powered by Drupal, Socrata, Docker, Akamai CDN, Solr search, Okta authentication, Github, Jenkins, APIs to consume legacy data from internal systems in Service Now, and Geo data mapping. It is hosted in a mature AWS architecture that ensures availability and reliability through load balancers, multiple EC2 instances, and master slave databases. FCC.GOV incorporates federated single sign on (SSO) and open data for forms. The DevOps process is very particular and requires orchestration and coordination with several teams within the FCC. Coordination is facilitated by Atlassian JIRA, Slack, MS Teams, and Zoom.
FCC.GOV serves approximately 1.6 million visitors per month averaging 70,000 visitors per week day and approximately 1,000 visitors at any given time. It has over 200,000 nodes, 116 contributed modules, and 40 custom modules. The FCC has active social media pages, particularly Twitter and Instagram. There are dozens of stakeholders with varying demands which require constant coordination to keep the public site uniform for 7 bureaus and 11 offices within the FCC, which are equivalent to agencies or sub-agencies within a major federal Department. Each office and bureau has its own unique requirements, external datasets, dynamic content, and often require unique content types, taxonomies, panels, and views. New content is constantly created and published. Data in the system dates to the 1920s.
FCC.GOV is a frequent target of hackers, intrusion attempts, and email breach attempts. Millions of cyber security breaches are attempted every day. There have been zero major security breaches despite its high traffic volume and visibility. This contract requires after-hours support. Agileana inherited an FCC website that had legacy code from Drupal 6 and before. The Drupal migration process is particularly challenging due to 10 years of technical debt that requires refactoring, evolving requirements, incomplete mobile friendly responsiveness, and continued evolution of the legacy Drupal 7 site which continues in parallel with Drupal 9 migration.
As part of our duties, we have met or exceeded expectations in the following tasks:
- Project Management and SLDC Documentation
- Research and Consultation
- Digital Analytics
- Content Strategy, Development, and Lifecycle Management
- Findability, SEO, and Metadata
- Design and Graphics
- General Web Development Tasks
- Usability
- Website Migration
- Section 508 Compliance
- Drupal and Content Management System Support
- Mobile Strategies and Implementation
- Web Application Development, APIs, and Data Access
- Operations and Maintenance
- New development, updates and maintenance of FCC.GOV website
- Perform routine maintenance of the Drupal websites including
- Design, implement and maintain web functionality & technologies
- Provide Drupal system administration
- Analyze website analytics to make recommendations to improve website performance
- Monitor and understands on-site visitor behavior
- Provide insights on data related to website traffic
- Use and maintain Google analytics.
- Verify and validate that all graphic and UX design artifacts are Section 508 compliant
- Assist with testing all websites
- Create, maintain, and use a comprehensive test plan for code deployments
- Test and correct website coding, layout, and design
- Coordinate, schedule, and submit code for code releases
- Conduct after-hour code releases.
- Utilize ticketing system(s) to manage developmental tasks
- Develop and document standard operating
- Provide thorough, detailed, and comprehensive documentation of development
- Provide industry standards and SME to assist federal standards and regulations
- Work closely with Information Systems Security Officer (ISSO
- Graphic and user experience design
- Create user experience and graphic design mockups of website and application
- Create and/or digitally manipulate web and social media graphics
- Create presentation material and maintain training materials