Document Management Software Development for an Atomic Energy Organization

Summary

An intergovernmental organization working in the nuclear field tracked nuclear materials through a dozen small, disconnected systems with data stored in different formats, partly on outdated mainframes used during facility inspections. INNERLUXES carried out deep business analysis — including reverse-engineering the legacy mainframe code — and designed an all-in-one, service-oriented document management solution on Microsoft technologies that unifies the functionality of the separate systems and stores all data in a single format, making inspectors' work faster and more efficient.

About the Client

The Client is an intergovernmental organization for scientific and technical cooperation in the nuclear field, with representations worldwide.

A Dozen Disconnected Systems on Aging Mainframes

Because nuclear material tracking is so complex, the organization had built a dozen small systems to manage the data, which created several problems: business processes changed quickly and the systems could not keep up with every aspect of tracking; the systems were not connected and data was stored in different formats in several places; and the complexity of the nuclear domain and the constraints of physics made a single unified system hard to create. Stakeholders also recorded data on outdated mainframes before, during, and after inspecting nuclear facilities. The organization decided to migrate to more modern systems to improve service quality and provide verification of all documentation.

Business Analysis, Reverse Engineering, and an SOA Design

To reach these goals, INNERLUXES refined and documented all existing business processes, rules, and artifacts as the decision source for what came next. Information was gathered through two main activities:

• Stakeholder discovery — interviewing stakeholders and studying their documentation, processes, and policies.
• Reverse engineering — reverse-engineering the mainframe code that performed data calculations, and recording all the calculation algorithms and business rules in the specifications.

Because of the sheer volume of information, the document-creation process was automated with a purpose-built tool that processes UML diagrams and generates documentation from the organization's templates. With the business processes documented, the team elaborated the requirements for the new system, developed the data structures and user-interface layouts, and verified them with end users. The new system was designed on Service-Oriented Architecture principles using the latest Microsoft technologies.

One Unified System for All Tracking

• INNERLUXES successfully performed the business analysis and developed and verified all the specifications.
• The team created an all-in-one solution that integrates the functionality of the previously separate systems and stores data in a unified format.
• Migrating to the automated system made the stakeholders' work faster and more efficient.

Technologies and Tools

ADABAS and PL/1 mainframe code; .NET Framework 3.5; Sparx Enterprise Architect; MS SQL Server 2008; MS Team Foundation Server; MS SharePoint 2007; UML.