Department of Energy

Poor Management of Nuclear Materials Tracking System Makes Success Unlikely Gao ID: AIMD-95-165 August 3, 1995

The Energy Department (DOE) is attempting to develop a new tracking system to replace its current system for monitoring U.S. imports and exports of nuclear materials. DOE plans to discontinue the existing system and begin operation of the replacement system in September 1995. However, DOE's replacement system is being developed in an undisciplined, poorly controlled manner that makes success unlikely. Planning was inadequate and basic system development practices were not followed. The upshot is that DOE has no guarantee that the replacement system will produce accurate and timely reports before it accepts the system and pays the subcontractor. DOE's disregard for basic system development practices to ensure the accuracy and dependability of its nuclear tracking system is inconsistent with the importance of the Nuclear Materials Management and Safeguards System, which produces the United States' officials records for tracking nuclear materials. It is not in DOE's best interests, therefore, to disconnect the existing system and replace it with an untested, undocumented new system. The history of software development is littered with systems that failed under similar circumstances.

GAO found that: (1) DOE has not implemented any of the GAO recommendations regarding new system planning and analysis and has no plans to do so because it believes its planning is sufficient and delaying the system would lead to unnecessary costs; (2) DOE does not know if its new system will meet users' needs or be cost-effective; (3) DOE has not addressed the subcontractor's failure to document its system development process and to place its software under configuration management, or its failure to require acceptance testing before taking delivery of the system and plan for parallel operations of the new and old systems to check the new system's performance; and (4) the risk of system failure is high, since DOE does not know the status of the system development effort or whether certain system components will perform as required.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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