The project, which began last month, aims to help the FDA better monitor the quality and productivity of development teams in eight decentralized centers that include in-house developers and contractors. To that end, Ray Russo, director of the Office of Business Enterprise Solutions in the FDA CIO's office, is looking to inject standard processes into application development while ensuring that IT managers can monitor the return on investment for that work.
The agency has already rolled out a new IT governance tool, the Cast Application Intelligence Platform from New York-based Cast Software, to get a comprehensive view of the source code for its development projects.
'When you have a lot of things outsourced to a lot of contractors, they are often doing that work off-site, and it can be difficult to get the kind of view of what is going on in that code you would like to get,' he said. 'Looking across projects, Cast gives you metrics ... that will tell you tons about complexity of the code. It then allows you to hook that into some cost measurements to see how much work costs and whether cost and complexity are growing or shrinking over time.'
The FDA over the next six months will focus on moving application development associated with its Office of Regulatory Affairs -- which leads the agency's field activities -- and its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which handles the new drug application and approval process, to be monitored by Cast, Russo said.
Among the first group of applications that will be migrated to the tool is a registry and listing system, where users register food and drug facilities that the FDA regulates. In addition, the agency is building a successor to the system used to track imported goods such as food. That system, designed to help guard against bioterrorism, also will be moved to CAST. Finally, the FDA will also use the tool as it builds new drug application processing systems.
According to Russo, all of the FDAs applications should be migrated to Cast by February 2007.
The tool will be helpful because it does not require developers to do a lot of manual entry; Instead, it automatically runs through source code, parses it and produces metadata that can be used to monitor and measure development work, he said.
'It looks through all the source code in the same way ... and produces an objective set of data from it,' he said. 'It seemed to provide benefits to every level of the software development life cycle -- from the people in the trenches all the way up to an enterprise view for the CIO.'
Because the tool automatically generates documentation of the code as it is written, it will provide the FDA with a baseline for impact analysis. That way, when a change is made, users will know how that change affects other parts of an application. This will be useful for an upcoming data center migration at the FDA and upgrades of ERP applications, Russo added.
While the tool comes with certain industry standards that can be used to review code, the FDA plans to add its own customized best practices and standards. 'We really don't have a good way to do that now,' he said. 'This will give us an automated way that should be painless.'
As part of the project, the FDA is also evaluating governance tools that will allow it to ensure that development efforts aren't duplicated, which Cast can't do, Russo said.