ACQDEMO’S CAS2NET 2.0 ALMOST DIDN’T HAPPEN
Before that, however, he worked at ALTESS on Vance’s team. During his 15 years of Army service, Parton found that he was good at fixing things, especially electronics. He leveraged that ability and earned a degree in software development from the College of Brockport, within the State University of New York system, in 2002. Tat eventually led to his job at ALTESS, managing the Army Budget Office’s P&R [Procurement and RDT&E, or research, development, test and evaluation] Forms software. Along with CAS2Net, P&R Forms is the best-known of the software packages that ALTESS has modernized.
ANOTHER COINCIDENCE It was almost a coincidence that the CAS2Net project came to ALTESS, Vance said. It happened that one of the people at the HCI office had served with Parton in the Army. (Parton exited the Army as a staff sergeant in 2002.). A fellow service member, Steve Edsall, worked at AcqDemo and the two got to talking. When Parton heard that AcqDemo was looking to upgrade CAS2Net, he saw an opportunity. He knew that ALTESS could do the work.
With improvements desperately needed and a substantial number of new employees coming into the AcqDemo system, HCI was on the verge of hiring the original contractor to improve the system, Vance and Parton said. However, Parton came to Fort Belvoir in about June 2017 to brief the HCI team on ALTESS’s capabilities and its ability to replace “CAS2Net 1.0 with a new, modern- ized system that would be more appropriate for the growing user population, and that would be able to support that growth over the next five to 10 years,” Parton said.
HCI “called a timeout” on bidding out the work, Vance said. From their sustainment work, it was clear to Vance and Parton
“that the code base was limited and not very scalable” and would need to be rebuilt.
According to Brock, the old system was so slow it could take all night for the Army AcqDemo office to run a report. As a result, she said, the office could never get real-time data.
Tat mirrors something that Vance said about the P&R system. Te Army Budget Office has reports that it must get to Congress. With the old version of P&R that ALTESS upgraded, Vance said, generating that report could take six to eight hours. Te system that ALTESS upgraded enabled the Defense Technical Informa- tion Center to run the reports in seconds.
Parton’s pitch to HCI was a hit. And because the relationship between ALTESS and HCI was government-to-government,
98 Army AL&T Magazine Spring 2019
ALTESS could be more flexible than an outside contractor could. If HCI wanted to update requirements after reaching an agreement with a contractor, it could mean more money and a contract modification, which could slow work. With ALTESS, that wouldn’t be necessary.
AGILE IS THE TICKET
“We had our initial requirements-gathering session around August 2017” with HCI, Parton said. Te development of the revamped CAS2Net took approximately a year, speed that Vance and Parton attributed to ALTESS’s Agile development approach.
“I worked for Chad [Vance] and his division managing software projects,” Parton said. “Really, what it boils down to with [devel- oping a] user interface is that a lot of times a user has a very hard time expressing their requirements in such a way that the software engineer knows exactly what they want. It’s almost like the soft- ware engineer needs to do mindreading in order to understand exactly what the user wants.” Going to work with the HCI team, Parton said, “I was able to help some in that role to communicate between the business side and the technical side. But, really, what enables the user interface to be better is that we went through an Agile process.”
Vance said that his team would take each requirement and code it in one- or two-week sprints, and then deliver that code for test- ing when the sprint was done. If new requirements came up, he said, they could work the code into the sprint schedule depend- ing on its urgency.
“Basically,” Parton said, “Chad and his team worked with the program office to define what would go into each sprint. Tat was completed, finalized and delivered by the end of each two-week sprint, and then it went into testing mode. Te user population, mostly component-level users across the Army, Air Force, Marines and Navy, went in and looked at the system and said, ‘Yeah, that’s not exactly what I meant,’ and so we were able to improve the user interface through that constant feedback loop.”
CONCLUSION According to Vance, Parton and others that Army AL&T spoke to, the HCI office saved a good deal of money and gained consid- erable flexibility by working with ALTESS on the CAS2Net project. For Vance, the project was part of ALTESS’s dual role as both a data facilitator and a software development shop, within its larger role as a modernization hub. In addition, Hale said, ALTESS has positioned itself as an information technol- ogy (IT) managed-service provider for applications required to
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