Independent Verification& Validation (IV&V) Case Study:
Executive Summary/Introduction
Our customer is responsible for providing affordable, timely and accessible financial assistance to businesses of all sizes, private non-profit organizations, homeowners, and renters following a disaster. Financial assistance is available in the form of low-interest, long-term loans. The customer’s disaster loans are the primary form of federal assistance for the repair and rebuilding of non-farm, private sector disaster losses. For this reason, the disaster loan program is the only form of our customer’s assistance not limited to small businesses.
Challenges
Our customer provides loans to homeowners, renters, and businesses impacted by declared disaster events. Their main system: The Disaster Credit Management System provides the technology and services needed to support the overall mission. It has been operated since 2004 for the purpose of processing, disbursing, and modifying disaster home and business loan applications received for qualifying disaster events. Since FY2017, our customer has been working on upgrading and modernizing the main system and has been replacing many of its parts and functionality with modernized software and operations. The Modernization initiative also included modernizing the sub-systems and several interfaces to external systems. The initiative has been taking longer than anticipated and the requirements are still under development. Therefore, the need for an Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) oversight of the modernization effort. The COVID-19 pandemic has created additional stress on the available DCMS resources, causing delays to the development effort. The increased demand for disaster relief required the customer to reallocate developing and testing resources to address immediate concerns related to system demand and capability. These types of ad-hoc emergency releases have challenged the IV&V effort to quickly adjust our focus and schedule to provide timely analysis and recommendations to the customer so that they remain consistent with industry standards and best practices.
How Our Services Helped
Using pre-defined checklists and similar tools founded on industry standards, QSMI performs an exhaustive review and analysis of all project activities, procedures, processes, documentation, and deliverables. The goal of this exercise is to ensure that generally accepted industry standards and best practices are followed while those efforts and outcomes are in keeping with the regulatory, statute and policies currently in effect are not jeopardized, while working towards enhancing internal and external customer experience and taking advantage of new technology that will reduce information technology development, operation, support and enhancement maintenance costs while providing a more manageable agile and adaptable technology platform.
QSMI IV&V team provides recommendations for correcting the weaknesses that the above required assessment identifies. For each area evaluated, a detailed analysis is performed and a report is submitted to include the background information, the gaps that have been identified and detailed recommendations. To identify the gaps, QSMI Team try to answer questions such as the ones below:
• Are the appropriate documentation and other project artifacts accurate and up-to-date?
• Is there an adequate level of Stakeholder involvement in the Project?
• Are best practices and metrics employed to identify issues, progress, performance, etc.?
Benefits /Results
QSMI is able to assist the customer in assessing, analyzing all system documentation, configuration and sprint activities and submitting our recommendations that are based on best Industry practices to the Executive Management. The customer was provided a clear solution to streamline the system for maximum efficiency and minimum system downtime or data loss. The results are summarized below:
• QSMI team analyzes and recommends updates to the project management plan including recommendations for adequate staff; staff skills and functional responsibility and authority within a structured project organization.
• Assess the Project’s Configuration Management (CM) function/ organization by reviewing CM documents and making recommendations regarding appropriate processes and tools to manage system changes.
• Perform a detailed review of the system documentation (Requirements, Design, Training, Test, and Management Plans, etc.) for accuracy and completeness.
• Assess and recommend improvements, as needed, to assure software testing is being performed adequately through review of test plans or other documentation and through direct observation of testing where appropriate.
• Performs an exhaustive review and analysis of all project activities including sprint activities, procedures, processes, documentation, and deliverables.
• Provides recommendations for correcting the weaknesses that the above required assessment identifies.