The Design and Realization of a Self-Hosted and Open-Source Agile Internal Development Platform

Platform Engineering (PE) is a growing area of Software Engineering, with many facets, including the elusive concept of Internal Development Platforms (IDPs). They integrate various technologies and tools to support the realization of software projects, especially their managing and developing roles, fostering Agile collaboration and enhancing team productivity. In particular for the new trends of Agile remote working and for Agile applied to the Digital Transformation in the Public Sector. While proprietary IDPs abound, academic research that could naturally lead to open-source IDPs remain scarce. In particular for Scrum, a fundamental Agile methodology in the strategic area of Digital Transformation in the Public Sector, where IDP self-hosting is also appropriate. This paper addresses this gap by proposing the design and realization of the first, to the best of our knowledge, IDP supporting Scrum, being open-source and with self-hosting capabilities. The end-product of our research is the Compositional Agile System (CAS), an extendable microservice architecture-based IDP. Its design, as well as CAS, makes full use of hands-on previous successful experiences of IDP development by members of this team, specifically non-trivial tasks in Italian Public Administration and to foster remote working in University Software Engineering classes, a practice started during the pandemic but now a standard. We offer several architectural and example scenarios where CAS can be of use, concentrating on the Public Administration. Particularly relevant is the use of CAS in analyzing a pillar of Italian Digital Administration available to its citizens, i.e., AppIo. The software is available as an open resource to the research community.