Department of Licensing (DOL)

Driver’s Field System & Address Verification
Client Server & Web Development

Project Description

The Department of Licensing (DOL) contracted Cayzen to provide staff support for the maintenance of the
Driver’s Field System (DFS), a desktop application installed statewide in DOL field offices. Its purpose is to create and manage the issuance of Public, Commercial, and Motorcycle licenses for the State of Washington. It interfaces with external applications through Web services. DFS has been in place for years and continues to evolve as new system requirements are mandated from changing laws and new initiatives. As a result, the DFS code base has grown in size and complexity resulting in inefficiencies, bugs, and usability issues. Cayzen was hired to resolve these issues and design and implement new features.

Project Deliverables and Tasks

Cayzen was engaged to perform an assessment of the DFS application for each of the outstanding bugs. Cayzen performed comprehensive analysis and design to ensure minimal regression errors and the greatest amount of flexibility for future maintenance. Cayzen also provided the following tasks:

• Developed class architecture for monitoring manual edits of license-related test scores and recording proper authorization for overrides.
• Developed architecture for pulling real-time test data and comparing it with license applications to ensure
  applicants are fully-qualified for requested licenses and endorsements.
• Researched address verification solutions to meet federal requirements for the Border Crossing initiative and also the performance and budget requirements set by DOL.
• Designed, documented, and implemented generic address verification service to be used by DOL.
• Developed a COM-compatible VB .Net namespace to encapsulate address verification activities and data structures including address searches, error handling, data types, and XML serialization. Designed and developed a wrapper in VB .Net for interoperability with a proprietary C .dll to interface with a USPS database.

Technologies

The technologies included Visual Studio 2005, VB.Net, VB 6.0, C, IIS 6.0, SQL Server 2000, and UML.

Project Outcomes and Results

The maintenance portion of the project was completed successfully and deployed statewide in January 2007. Address verification and the second phase of maintenance are to be deployed statewide in the next release cycle, May 2007. Throughout this project Cayzen has emphasized Development Patterns and best practices to reduce risk of change in the future. Previous address verification development resulted in a tightly-coupled user interface and business logic, saving DOL over $150,000 per year.