Virtual Case File
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Virtual Case File (or VCF) was a software application developed by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) between 2000 and 2005. The project was officially abandoned in April 2005, while still in development stage and cost the federal government nearly $170 million. In 2006, The Washington Post wrote "In a 318-page report, completed in January 2005 and obtained by The Post under the Freedom of Information Act, [the Aerospace Corporation] said the SAIC software was incomplete, inadequate and so poorly designed that it would be essentially unusable under real-world conditions. Even in rudimentary tests, the system did not comply with basic requirements, the report said. It did not include network-management or archiving systems—a failing that would put crucial law enforcement and national security data at risk"[1]
Origins
In September 2000, the FBI announced the "Trilogy" program, intended to modernize the bureau's outdated
believed that ACS was already obsolete when it was first deployed in 1995.Launch
Bob E. Dies, then the bureau's assistant director of information resources and head of the Trilogy project, prepared initial plans in 2000 for a replacement to ACS and several other outdated software applications. In June 2001, a
Problems and abandonment
Initial development was based on meetings with users of the current ACS system. SAIC broke its programmers up into eight separate and sometimes competing teams. One SAIC security engineer, Matthew Patton, used VCF as an example in an October 24, 2002 post on the InfoSec News mailing list regarding the state of federal information system projects in response to a Senator's public statements a few days earlier about the importance of doing such projects well. His post was regarded by FBI and SAIC management as attempting to "
In December 2002, the Bureau asked the United States Congress for increased funding, seeing it was behind schedule. Congress approved an additional $123 million for the Trilogy project. In 2003, the project saw a quick succession of three different CIO's come and go before Zal Azmi took the job, which he held until 2008. Despite development snags throughout 2003, SAIC delivered a version of VCF in December 2003. The software was quickly deemed inadequate by the Bureau, who lamented inadequacies in the software. SAIC claimed most of the FBI's complaints stemmed from specification changes they insisted upon after the fact.
On March 24, 2004, Robert Mueller testified to Congress that the system would be operational by the summer, although this seemed impractical and unlikely to happen. SAIC claimed it would require over $50 million to get the system operational, which the Bureau refused to pay. Finally, in May 2004 the Bureau agreed to pay SAIC $16 million extra to attempt to salvage the system and also brought in
Reasons for failure
The project demonstrated a systematic failure of software engineering practices:[3]
- Lack of a strong technical architecture("blueprint") from the outset led to poor architectural decisions
- Repeated changes in specification
- Repeated turnover of management, which contributed to the specification problem
- Micromanagement of software developers
- The inclusion of many FBI personnel who had little or no formal training in computer science as managers and even engineers on the project
- Scope creep as requirements were continually added to the system even as it was falling behind schedule
- Code bloat due to changing specifications and scope creep—at one point it was estimated the software had over 700,000 lines of code.
- Planned use of a flash cutoverdeployment made it difficult to adopt the system until it was perfected.
Implications
The bureau faced a great deal of criticism following the failure of the VCF program. The program lost $104 million in taxpayer money. In addition, the bureau continued to use the antiquated ACS system, which many analysts felt was hampering the bureau's new
References
- ^ a b Eggen, Dan; Witte, Griff (18 August 2006). "The FBI's Upgrade That Wasn't" (PDF). The Washington Post. Retrieved 11 June 2013.
- ^ "Full Page Reload". September 2005.
- ^ "Statement of Glenn A. Fine" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2005-05-15. Retrieved 2023-04-02. Congressional Testimony, US DOJ Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, February 2005
- ^ FBI puts Sentinel on hold
- ^ "FBI's Sentinel Project: 5 Lessons Learned". InformationWeek. 2012-08-02. Retrieved 2014-07-29.
External links
- IEEE Spectrum article: Who killed the virtual case file? 11 page detailed article of the entire timeline
- The FBI's Upgrade That Wasn't - Washington Post article about the project
- Testimony of Inspector General Glenn A. Fine before the Department of Justice - February 3, 2005: Project Audit results
- Testimony of Inspector General Glenn A. Fine before the Department of Justice - July 27, 2005
- Matthew Patton's October 24, 2002 posting on InfoSec News about VCF
- IEEE Spectrum Radio audio discussion of the failure. Participants are Peter Neumann, Steve Bellovin, Matt Blaze, and Robert Charette.