Agency Challenge
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) mission is to transform the current Electronic Immigration System (ELIS) from a paper-based to an electronic environment, enabling USCIS to better serve its customers through a process that is more customer-centric, transparent, efficient and accessible.
PSI Solution
Our solution leverages our significant expertise with agile methodologies to help USCIS provide faster, more efficient electronic immigration services and impact the lives of millions of people across the globe. Impact of software development using our Agile techniques:
Expediting green card production by moving more than 500,000 existing cases to Streamlined Processing cutting the agency’s backlog in half
Building case distribution modules in ELIS which allows service centers to efficiently allocate work across services centers and leads to faster adjudication time and a lower backlog of cases
Applying user-centered design principles and UI development expertise to rebuild the ELIS Digital Evidence Viewer as an OpenShift microservice application. The Viewer makes adjudicators more effective and reduces backlogs by providing the information they need to serve petitioners
Building the Naturalization Civics testing module automated a cumbersome part of the citizenship process increasing adjudicator productivity PSI’s integrated solution for USCIS involves innovative approaches that address current pain points, bringing the latest industry trends and best practices into the FADS II environment.
To accomplish a government agency’s mission, the work environment must be flexible and adaptable to changes — from ideating to solutioning. PSI’s skilled technical teams work toward deploying IT software through the iterative process of Agile development. With this methodology, incremental and collaborative work sequences allow for the creation of an efficient product for all customers. PSI’s Agile solutions improve the quality and delivery of software to enhance value to your mission. By unifying the software development and software operation teams, DevOps creates dependability in coding, testing, and configuring products. These groups work side-by-side with customers to target evolving needs and regularly obtain feedback. By organizing into self managing, cross-functional teams, development cycles are reduced, testing is automated and products deliver tangible business value everyday.
As a prime contractor on the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services (USCIS), Flexible Agile Development Services II contract, PSI provides nine high-performing DevOps teams that use agile and lean processes to deliver high-quality, innovative capabilities for the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS). PSI’s DevOps Teams include Developers, Quality Assurance (QA) Engineers, Business Analysts (BAs), and User Interface (UI)/User Experience (UX) Designers. Business analysts collaborate closely with the government to develop user stories and acceptance criteria. PSI’s use of Agile and lean techniques including Kanban have facilitated communication between development teams and product owners to ensure top priorities are met rapidly.
The developers build of these requirements and go through code review, QA testing and automated testing to ensure quality and dependability. PSI technical leads implemented an open source first technical stack to reduce costs and increase software maintainability. We implemented more than 15 microservices which decreased deployment times and increased fault tolerance. Our certified Amazon Web Services (AWS) private cloud hosting and deployments have improved performance, availability and security. ELIS enhancements are deployed daily to production with zero downtime.
Whatever your goals, PSI can take you from where you are to where you want to be. Our agile, cost-effective and transformative solutions increase workforce collaboration and deliver increased value to support your complex mission.
Key Benefits Provided by PSI
High product quality—Automated unit and integration test coverage over 90% and daily product demos are used to deliver consistently defect free software
High customer satisfaction—PSI is regularly chosen by customers to develop highly visible, mission critical software directly enables an agency's mission.
Faster ROI—Faster response times to sudden market changes; shorter learning cycles; decreased costs
