Clients

Overview

The FAA regulates and operates public aviation in the United States, and is responsible for maintaining the safety of such flights. As part of an Agency wide effort to promote safety across the National Airspace, detailed data is collected surrounding all types of incidents involving aircraft. Information influencing incidents such as Near Mid-Air Collisions and airport runway violations can provide insight into safety trends that may be used to avoid such dangerous events in the future.

Objectives

VMD led a cross functional team comprised of Java architects and developers along with FAA subject matter experts to build a web software application for the collection and management of approximately 12,000 annual air safety incidents.

Requirements

Full life-cycle internet J2EE software development effort for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)

• Online, web-enabled application
• Streamlined data collection via user interface
• Consolidated reporting and archiving
• Standardization of form formatting
• Personalized content and preferences
• Flexible user management and security modules

Solution Description

• Hardware: Clustered Sun Fire V480s running Sun Solaris 8
• Languages, Databases, and other Development Support Tools: Oracle 9i Database, Oracle 9iAS, J2EE, OID/LDAP, XML, Hibernate, Struts, ANT, Eclipse IDE, ClearCase, ClearQuest, RationalRose, UML

The Air Traffic Quality Assurance (ATQA) System is a web-based application that allows for the online management of business processes surrounding aircraft incident reports throughout the National Airspace System. Built on a J2EE platform, the ATQA system relies heavily on Oracle software products (Oracle 9i Database, Oracle 9iAS, and Oracle Internet Directory/LDAP for authentication and roles based access) as well as open source frameworks (Hibernate for the persistence layer and Struts/JSPs for the presentation tier). The system provides for personalized content/preferences as well as an extremely flexible user management and security system that allows for the differentiation of approximately 2000 separate LDAP security groups for various users throughout the FAA and other federal agencies.

Process

VMD followed the Rational Unified Process through all phases of the ATQA development effort. The project team completed such activities as Vision formulation, business modeling, requirements analysis and definition through use cases, architectural design, team development, requirements based testing, and configuration managed transition to a national production rollout. The ATQA software delivery model formed the basis for the FAA's effort to become an iCMM certified software development organization.

Results

VMD led the successful delivery of a multi-tier, agency wide J2EE web application for the collection of aviation safety incidents. The application has undergone 4 subsequent version releases and has added 9,000 FAA employees as registered users. 100% of all FAA tracked incidents are now being collected and managed through the ATQA system. In addition, the ATQA application has served as the foundation for additional FAA enterprise web development efforts that VMD is continuing to support.