John Grant

Government solicitations to purchase custom software are often nightmarishly long and complicated documents that take many months or even years to write. 18F, a government office dealing with software development,  favors agencies using agile software developers because the savings of time and money in the procurement process are enormous. An agile software solicitation can be about a dozen pages and written in less than a day. A fourth-generation attorney with a decade of tech industry experience before law school, John Grant tears down the federal government’s Agile Software Development Solicitation template from 18F, part of the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Technology Transfer services. Grant explains how understanding agile and 18F’s template will help you draft better contracts.

In this episode, John Grant—a consultant known as the “agile attorney”—walks us through an agile software development agreement. This one comes from 18F, the hiring agency for government services software in the United States.