DFAS Modernization

Project: DIFMS/NIMMS Modernization
Client: Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS)

On this recent project for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the ResQSoft™ Engineer technology was used to successfully web-enable two complex business / financial applications that were migrated from a Unisys mainframe to Sun servers. The metrics for this project are impressive.

• The legacy systems were composed of approximately 330 COBOL programs, representing approximately 470 screens.
• Approximately 2 million Java statements were produced.
• Functionality delivered was 40,000 function points (est.)
• Approximately 200 issues were reported during integration and SAT testing (about two orders of magnitude better than industry averages for hand coding)*

DIFMS/NIMMS have a large number of users -- about 6000 registered users, in fact, including about 3000 of them on the technically difficult NMCI platform. Average load is about 800 concurrent users - and DFAS is running multiple copies of the system on one machine. In this environment, we were able to achieve sub-second response time at the web and application server level, for most transactions.

On this project, we were also able to generate 100% of the system - meaning that we were able to make fixes and then have the tools rewrite the entire application. This approach allowed us to respond to multiple issues discovered during testing, in a matter of days rather than weeks.

* According to Capers Jones, Applied Software Measurement (p. 230), the US average defect potentials per function point are daunting. The rate for projects of 100 FP= 4; 1,000 = 5; 10,000 = 6; 100,000 = 7.25 (all for MIS projects; all defects from all sources). These statistics are averages and probably include failed projects, but the message is clear: defects are a serious problem. The number of defects found in the code we produced on this project was exceptionally low.