level of effort

[patrickmcconnell]

Question/Comment on Forest Service e-Permitting API RFQ

Name and affiliation

Patrick McConnell, Agile BPA Manager, SemanticBits

Section of RFQ documents

RFQ-API, page 4, staffing plan

API SOO, page 1, user stories

Question/Comment

Can the government please provide an estimated team size to complete this work? It is impossible to tell from the SOO the complexity of work. For example, are we required to expose a highly complex set of data through the API or a simple one? Are there hundreds, dozens, or a handful of Oracle tables? Are there hundreds, dozens, or a handful of columns in each table? Is the database structure nicely normalized? Is there unstructured data in any columns that requires finer-grained query/update/access? Are all columns in the database typed to the data type that will be handled through the API? Is there any business logic required in create or update? The user stories seem to indicate roles ("if I have the proper permissions"). Are there many roles? Is entity-level authorization required? Are field mappings intended to be used to add additional fields to already existing entities in the API, or could new entities be added this way? What are the performance requirements for scalability?

It is acceptable to us that the answers to these types of questions are determined as discovery during project execution. However, in that case, please provide a set team size so that we don't have to guess at the complexity and all contractors can be evaluated equally. Otherwise, the government may find during best-value tradeoff that one contractor is determined to be the best overall value simply because they guessed at a lower LOE than another contractor.

[rrefoy]

To get an idea of the complexity of the API request schema and mappings, please consult the draft schema's here. As you mention, many of the answers to these questions will be determined during the project execution. As the staffing plan indicates, it is up to the vendor to determine the appropriate size for the team.