Case Study: State of California, Office of Systems Integration (OSI)

State of California, Office of Systems Integration (OSI), Statewide Automated Welfare System (SAWS).

Technical Assessment of the Consortium IV (C-IV) Welfare System.

PCG Technology Consulting (PCG TC, formerly Eclipse Solutions, Inc.) was engaged to provide technical IV&V activities during the development, implementation, and operations phases of the C-IV System, an n-tier, J2EE, browser-based welfare application. The C-IV system was designed to help manage the increasing complexity of the California welfare, Medi-Cal and employment programs and to assist county staff in their efforts to achieve the outcomes and performance goals required by the various programs. The system, which was successfully implemented in 2004, supports 6,100 users in 127 sites across four California counties and maintains information on 800,000 welfare recipients.

PCG TC worked closely with the OSI-SAWS and the C-IV Systems Integrator to conduct a detailed risk and standards based assessment of the C-IV System including:

• Technical Architecture

• Application Architecture

• Data Architecture

• Software Engineering Standards

• Application Development Languages & Tools

• Source Code Analysis

PCG TC conducted technical architecture assessments of the C-IV project that resulted in three reports that were completed during the General System Design phase, the Release 1 Detailed System Design phase, and the Release 2 Detailed System Design phase of the project.

PCG TC conducted implementation assessments of the C-IV project that focused on performance modeling, capacity planning, application and infrastructure security, application coding and construction, logical and physical database design, middleware design, software standardization and component re-usability, source code maintainability, and application testing and deployment.

Multiple application source code inspections were conducted.  The source code was analyzed and inspected to ensure adherence to the project’s documented standards and industry accepted software engineering standards.  Discrepancies were identified and subsequent code inspections validated their correction.

PCG TC began providing technical IV&V assessments of the C-IV project in July 2001. PCG TC was awarded three consecutive C-IV technical IV&V contracts covering the period from 2002 to June 2005. All contracts were successfully completed.

Among the key results:

• The PCG TC code reviews resulted in improved software quality and code maintainability;
• The C-IV application change order costs and schedules are considerably lower and shorter than other consortia applications;
• The C-IV application development finished on time and on budget;
• The I-SAWS County Consortia (35 counties) has chosen to move to the C-IV system.