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.'