For almost a decade, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has relied on Computech to maintain the software of the national import system. As CBP begins to modernize this system, they are relying on Computech to capture the requirements of import processing.

The Challenge
Customs law requires that all imports to the U.S. be preceded by an electronic transmission. The national import system processes these messages to identify potentially dangerous or unlawful shipments, assess duties, collect revenue, and compile trade statistics. This system has evolved over the decades as trade laws have evolved. NAFTA, new trade programs, anti-terrorism legislation… all have been incorporated into the source code of this huge system.

When CBP began to modernize the importation process, they asked Computech to undertake a comprehensive effort to capture all of the requirements that reside in the source code of the import system. CBP contracted with Computech to review every line of source code in order to capture all business rules, processing requirements and data relationships involved in processing over 70,000 commercial importations a day. This analysis of the current system will become the foundation of the new system.

The scale of this task is immense. The system is comprised of over 2500 individual programs and 6 million lines of source code. It performs functions as diverse as targeting dangerous shipments and revenue accounting.

An Organized Approach
Computech immediately realized that the task required an organized and standardized approach. The system contains tens of thousands of business rules embedded in thousands of programs. These business rules are not neatly labeled as such; two analysts reviewing the same program might capture its business rules in two very different ways. To enforce standardization and improve productivity, Computech built automated tools to assist the analysts as they combed through the thousands of programs of the current system.

Computech built a code analyzer that led the analyst through a program, highlighting decision points and arithmetic operations. The tool helped guide the analysts to sections of the program code where business rules were most likely to reside and provided a notepad where the analyst could translate the program code into plain English. It built a link between the business rule and the program code so that the designer could see the interplay of business rules in the flow of a program. The tool also assembled the business rules captured by 25 analysts into a single database.