The Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), Office of Single Family Housing (SFH), Office of Single Family Program Development (SFPD) is responsible for all matters pertaining to the development and implementation of policies, program guidelines, standards, and operating procedures for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Longevity is providing mission critical support to the development, ongoing maintenance and operation of the FHA single family policy and procedures and supporting systems. The Single Family Housing Policy Handbook 4000.1 is a consolidated, consistent, and comprehensive source of FHA Single Family Housing policy that serves more than 80,000 users. Lenders needed to easily access the Handbook and related policy from their mobile devices. 

The Longevity team worked closely with FHA to identify the software development lifecycle documentation needed to support their organizational requirements for the design, development, and deployment of a mobile application. The team leveraged the existing HUD Project Planning and Management (PPM) Life Cycle templates and supplemented the documentation with Longevity’s own delivery framework documentation to fully document the system.

The application was developed as a hybrid mobile app, leveraging the Ionic Mobile Framework. The Ionic Mobile Framework–is an open source cross platform mobile development framework, utilizes Google’s Angular framework as the base layer of the framework.  This framework provides developers the ability to build and deploy native mobile apps to both the Android and iOS app store using the same web technologies (HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript) used to develop websites. The framework comes with a command line interface that developers use to bundle up the HTML/CSS/JavaScript into a native binary file that can be deployed to each respective app store.

More than 5,000 internal and external stakeholder groups utilize the lifecycle app, including the IT organization and lenders who are dependent on the policy handbook for day-to-day guidance in underwriting the FHA loans, to define the system’s requirements.