Powerful,Targeted Solutions

The ATLASS software application, developed and maintained by IR Tech and based out of the Marine Corps Logistics Command in Albany, Georgia, provides unit and enterprise-level supply management and reporting capabilities for all levels of the Marine Corps.  This effort is contracted out of Zone 2. This project was initiated as an effort to bring legacy ADA-based DOS applications into a modern interface, and to translate business rules into current development languages. The IR Tech effort started with a two-part process to document and define business rules and requirements. For the first step, IR Tech worked with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) within the Legacy Systems group to step through all aspects of existing system functionality, documenting behavior, data definitions, system interfaces, and reporting requirements. The second step ran concurrently, and tasked the software development team to analyze existing source code and to extract business logic from systems currently in use. This process provided an accurate aggregation of actual system behaviors and provided a clear understanding of system operations internally and externally to the application.

The software design and business logic information extracted and generated was used to define a set of requirements for the software development effort, and these requirements then used for task generation, scheduling, and project planning efforts. The original ATLASS development process was organized to produce a deployable (Windows NMCI Desktop) application, perform rigorous testing of application and complex logic, and to create installable packages with other necessary infrastructure and components. This process was completed ahead of schedule and subsequently used for certification and accreditation efforts.

The ATLASS application was built in a Java J2EE environment, using Oracle’s OC4J application server container for managing business logic and web page generation. For data storage the Oracle Lite RDBMS product was selected and embedded into the ATLASS application, minimizing external dependencies and issues around software installation and management. The design of the application around a web-based interface, even for a desktop-deployed application, allowed for users to interact with the application in a familiar manner. In user testing and previews it was found that users were able to work quickly and easily with the familiar web interface as compared to the legacy DOS-based system views.

ATLASS development continued managing software maintenance and development efforts, tasked to continually improve the users experience while expanding the capabilities found within the application. Additional functional modules have been added as extensions to the original software without requiring any full-scale redevelopment efforts. The ATLASS application has also been extended to move from a single-user/single-unit configuration to a full server-based multi-user/multi-unit system with multiple levels of access control and full CAC-card integration. The current ATLASS server infrastructure supports multiple nodes of execution, batch execution of reporting and automatic data imports, and high availability clustering of components at all levels of the application architecture.

The ATLASS support team at IR Tech uses a variety of technologies to assist in planning, development, and quality management. For underlying documentation the team uses Confluence, an enterprise Wiki product that allows users at multiple locations to have consistent views of information and documentation. Software change management is coordinated through a central Subversion repository, managing software branches for legacy and current software releases, as well as code management between deployed and server-based configurations of the ATLASS software. Supporting this version control repository is an application called Fisheye, which provides reporting and analytics on all changes performed anywhere within the entire subversion tree. The IR Tech team uses Bamboo as a continuous build management server, ensuring that every change committed to the repository is checked out, built, and tested. This process identifies any issues on code quality or missing changes quickly and avoids impacts on development and the software release process. Finally, the IR Tech team uses Jira for issue tracking both in software engineering and customer support. Jira provides flexible issue management, assignment, tracking, and planning for multiple versions of the ATLASS application being planned at any given time. The integration of Jira into the development IDE tools keeps developers focused on assigned tasks, and provides visibility to project status at any given time.

IR Tech maintains the development support infrastructure including the tools and software, as well as maintaining development instances of multiple environments and configurations for testing the ATLASS software. Given that ATLASS can be deployed on desktops, servers, and in many types of cluster or single node configurations, the development and test teams are careful to maintain various configurations to ensure that all changes and releases of the software are tested completely. Using virtualization technologies, IR Tech is able to maintain multiple server infrastructures and deployed user configurations to test, identify potential issues, and re-test software as needed.

In Zone 6, our teammate Stanley provides system engineering, hardware, and software support to SPAWAR Systems Center San Diego for C4I programs that include the Global Command and Control System – Maritime (GCCS-M) Family of Systems (FOS). Expertise they provide supports systems hardware engineering and installation professional services, systems software installation technical services, Fleet technical support and Casualty Report (CASREP) response services, and decommissioning hardware engineering services.Their technical support entails the full range of Fleet technical support including hardware engineering, hardware and software installations, and post installation documentation and support. Tasks provide systems engineering, development, integration, test, and life-cycle support for a wide range of Navy, Joint, and National Command Control Communications Computer and Intelligence (C4I) systems.  These systems serve to consolidate Command Control and Intelligence functions along with cryptologic, navigation, environmental, and logistic capabilities to provide an integrated C4I capability to the warfighter.