IET Customer Profile

ACT Insurance Systems Limited, an insurance administration software specialist, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Misys Plc, one of the world's largest software and services groups. ACT has been producing successful insurance software for over 20 years and clients world-wide include leading insurance companies, intermediaries, banks and mutuals.

As a member of the Insurance Division of Misys, ACT Insurance Systems is a major component in a grouping of businesses supplying quality solutions across the whole spectrum of insurance operations, the area of expertise upon which Misys was originally founded. One of the leading investors in R&D in the Information Technology Sector, Misys has afforded ACT the opportunity to research, design and develop from first principles a totally new and unique insurance software product - Momentum

Funded without external customer sponsorship, the five year development programme has resulted in a product capable of reconciling the requirements of the broad diversity of businesses operating within the international insurance marketplace with the demands of rapidly evolving computer and software technology. The powerful engine at the heart of the Momentum Insurance Template development is Computer Associates' market leading component based development environment, CA Gen. Consistently rated by industry watchers as pre-eminent in its field, ACT chose CA Gen  for the benefits it could offer, not only to its development team, but also that of its customers. By using the latest application development environment, this model is automatically transformed into a working application comprising of a series of reusable business components with identified and documented interfaces.

Background

When ACT commenced the development of Momentum in 1995, the decision was taken to develop the application in a single model. The primary influencing factor was that the version of Composer used at the time did not support object migration. By mid 1996 the model had grown to contain nearly 1.5 million objects and the model size was causing a number of difficulties on the small NT server that was used at the time. The main concerns were the length of time taken to download subsets of the models.

A review of the model management practices was undertaken which resulted in a decision to split the large model up into multiple development models. Whilst this would reduce the time and resources required for uploads and downloads from each development model, the issue of increased model complexity was recognised, and a decision taken to review the use of automated tools to assist with model management.

GuardIEn Implementation

The implementation of GuardIEn commenced in April 1997 whilst there was still one development model. After the initial training course, the product was implemented to control changes to the central development model. At the time the project still used Composer 3, which meant that GuardIEn’s automated migration facility could not be used because it required Composer 4 for aggregate set support, but the product proved valuable for change request definition and the migration report was used to help scope the object migrations.

The large development model was then split into 13 development models, and GuardIEn’s concept of assigning a master model for each deliverable proved invaluable in ensuring that the updates to a common object were performed in the correct model.

In early 1998, the models were converted to COOL:Gen 4.1a which enabled the use of GuardIEn’s automated migration features. The project also started to use the automated system updating facilities to manage the implementation of changes into the integration test environment.

Template Development

A feature of ACT’s development is that the application can be delivered to the customer as a template model, with the expectation that the customer will customise and enhance the application using their own CA Gen toolsets. This introduces a new dimension to the configuration management problem -- how best to deliver new releases of the template to the customer and how the customer should implement new releases of the template and integrate them with the customisations that have been made to date.

GuardIEn supports the concept of parallel development, which involves the simultaneous development of multiple releases of an application in parallel. In essence, this is what can be done with Momentum with the customer being responsible for the implementation of the current release and ACT responsible for the development of the next release.

To simplify and automate this process further, ACT are in discussion with IET about approaches to automating the parallel development approach across multiple GuardIEn applications, with the ability to distribute electronically the specifications of the changes to the application with the new release of the model to facilitate the implementation of new releases of the template whilst retaining the customisations and enhancements that have already been applied by the customer.