The 12-month project, which began in February, aims to help FDA managers better monitor the quality and productivity of contract and in-house teams in eight decentralized development centers.

Ray Russo, director of the Office of Business Enterprise Solutions in the FDA CIO's office, said the effort should inject standard processes into agency application development projects and ensure that IT managers can monitor their returns on investment.

As part of the project, the agency has already started rolling out a new IT governance tool, Cast Software Inc.'s Cast Application Intelligence Platform, which provides a comprehensive view of source code.

"When you have a lot of things outsourced to a lot of contractors, it can be difficult to get the kind of view of what is going on in that code [that] you would like," Russo said.

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