Tracking new technologies at the U.S. Air Force

Although better known now as the place where Balkan leaders brokered a peace plan for Bosnia, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the midwestern United States is a powerful force in American aeronautics. The military's world-class Wright Laboratory leads the exploration and development of key technologies for the Air Force--from infrared sensors to jet propulsion. Many of those technologies transfer later to non-military use by universities, local governments or businesses.

The U.S. government appropriates to Wright Laboratory more than $1 billion (U.S.) a year for research. The work is conducted in-house by hundreds of scientists and engineers and by contractually funded research institutions. To be sure, the task of closely monitoring all of the research requires far more than paper and pencil. In June, Wright Laboratory will launch a new enterprise-wide tracking system created with Compuware's UNIFACE client/server application development environment.

When deployed, about 700 engineers, financial professionals, system managers and other employees will use the application, known as "A Science and Technology Action Reporting System,"or simply ASTARS. They will run ASTARS on a mixture of Microsoft Windows, Windows 95 and Macintosh computers. The client computers will be connected via a wide-area-network at Wright-Patterson or modems at off-site locations. ASTARS will access Oracle 7 data on a Sun Solaris server and interface with a half-dozen other database applications.

Replacing a host-terminal application

For years, ASTARS existed at Wright Laboratory as a host-terminal application developed for a VAX minicomputer. Recently, Wright Laboratory decided to replace the proprietary VAX machine with open systems. "In reality, we found that vendor independence is very difficult to achieve," says Ed Davis, an MIS engineer with Wright Laboratory's business re-engineering group. "A reasonable compromise is to use popular versions of DBMSs and client platforms and technology standards such as UNIX and TCP/IP, and to select an application development tool that supports the full suite. UNIFACE provided that and other critical support for us."

The business re-engineering group chose UNIFACE after an extensive search of dozens of application development tools on the market. To avoid getting caught up in flashy appearances, the group first identified 100 criteria and weighted each to reflect its relative importance. Then the group retained the U.S.-based professional services firm of Computer Sciences Corp. to help evaluate the options against those requirements. Wright Laboratory and Computer Sciences put the top-ranked tools through in-house trials. In the end, they selected UNIFACE.

Reasons for choosing UNIFACE

UNIFACE stood out for its technology independence, which enables an application to simultaneously access multiple DBMSs, computers and networks or shift from one technology brand to another without recoding. "ASTARS accesses an Oracle database for most of its activity, but also interfaces with a half dozen other Oracle databases," Davis says. "One of those DBMSs may eventually change to Sybase, another to Ingres. We wanted to have some options built into the tool." And UNIFACE's PolyServer connectivity software eliminated the need to run Oracle SQL*Net on client workstations.

Another factor: the methodology adopted by the Air Force for modeling business processes and data corresponded directly to the model-driven techniques in UNIFACE. As a result, Wright Laboratory could easily build into ASTARS a complete set of business rules to govern the execution of research contracts.

Productivity gains

A team of about 30 Wright Laboratory and Computer Sciences employees--developers, DBAs, technical writers and managers--worked side by side to develop the client/server version of ASTARS. Developers and "power users" also collaborated in "usability labs" every 30 to 60 days. The developers reviewed iterative prototypes of ASTARS with end users and gained valuable feedback. "This meant developers could go back and work on something that matters," says Davis, who is responsible for architectural issues and GUI development. When complete, ASTARS will consist of approximately 100 screens and 1,500 data elements.

"We have seen productivity gains in several areas with UNIFACE," Davis adds. "The biggest gain has been in having UNIFACE automatically enforce referential integrity between data entities when we define relationships in the application model. Second, UNIFACE gives us the freedom to apply business rules at the appropriate level. We can choose to place business rules in the application or on the fields and entities in the application model. We take advantage of the productivity gains provided by the reusability of fields defined in the application model."

After migrating to UNIFACE 6.1 from an earlier version, Davis's staff also realized a boost in productivity due to new GUI development features. "Finally, the model editor has given us the tools and facility for segmenting our large database into smaller logical database models," Davis notes. "These smaller models are better normalized and are a step toward a distributed database at some point."

"Intelligent user roles" are one of the many business rules incorporated by the team into ASTARS. As a result of embedded roles, ASTARS will recognize an end user's job responsibilities and automatically provide access to appropriate functions. For example, ASTARS will allow certain managers to establish a new research project, but grant all other employees read-only access to those files.

Critical to contract management

From the time the U.S. Congress approves funding for an Air Force research or support project until the end of that project, ASTARS serves as watchdog. As soon as the money is allocated, information about a project's mission and the public or private organizations contracted to carry out the project will be fed into ASTARS. The application will then track all activity related to that project--commitments, obligations, expenditures and technical progress.

Truly enterprise-wide, ASTARS will be integrated with several other applications at Wright Laboratory or higher in the military chain of command. ASTARS will give front-line engineers complete financial reports to help them manage contracts on a day-to-day basis. As part of that reporting, ASTARS will retrieve financial transactions from the U.S. Air Force General Accounting and Finance Center every night, match them with transactions already stored in ASTARS and flag any discrepancies.

In addition to interfacing with Wright Laboratory purchasing and accounting systems, ASTARS will send summary financial contract data to an executive information system used by Wright Laboratory's Commander and his deputies to effectively manage laboratory resources. Finally, ASTARS will send results from research or support efforts to a database at the Defense Technical Information Center in the nation's capital.

Although highly sophisticated and integrated, ASTARS was designed to be simple to use. Davis points to the ease with which financial staff can work with information from ASTARS. "Financial people live and die by spreadsheets," he says. "With ASTARS, they need the ability to cut and paste data straight from the screen and dump it into their spreadsheets. UNIFACE will provide the capability to do that."

In summary, Davis says that a client/server version of ASTARS will put Wright Laboratory "on a pretty good track."

"With UNIFACE, we'll be able to leverage all of our hardware and computing power. We will manage our own application so we'll reduce our dependence on MIS. And we'll simplify the client installation as much as possible."