DSS Offers Deep VA Workflow and Technology Expertise

This is fifth in a series of blog posts highlighting DSS’s experience and success stories supporting the VA and improving Veteran care and outcomes.

With a deep legacy in supporting innovation development for the VA, DSS offers something highly unique in this arena: its peoples’ technical expertise to help the VA meet mission and innovation goals.

Specifically, DSS’ R&D department is comprised of 115 software engineers, consultants, and architects, who all bring a wealth of knowledge and technical expertise to VA engagements.  In fact, the average development staff member possesses more than 12 years of VA workflow and technology know-how. Cumulatively, this exceeds 1,400 man-years of experience.

Many of DSS’ recent new hires are full-stack developers, supporting DSS’ DevOps culture where developers, QA, and our IT department collaborate to build faster, reliable products. This is achieved through the DSS Web Automation Framework, an in-house automation of regressing and UI test scripts. DSS plans to incorporate automated build processes within this framework.

The DSS development staff are proficient in an array of technologies used to develop products and are used within VA service contracts, including:

High-Level Languages & Web Technologies: Delphi, MUMPS (M), SQL, C#.Net, VB, ASP, HTML5, CSS3, NodeJS, JavaScript (Angular, Polymer, AJAX, JQuery, Backbone, Bootstrap and other frameworks) Databases: VistA, MS SQL Server, MS Access

Authentication and Authorization:

Active Directory Domain and Federation Services, OAuth/OAuth2, SAML, OpenID, DoD’s DS Logon, VA’s IAM and PIV per HSPD-12 Commercial Integration Engines: PilotFish, Mirth, Ensemble, Cloverleaf Reporting Tools: Tableau, Crystal Reports, JasperSoft Requirements & Source Control Tools: Rational, Rally, Atlassian/Jira, Team Foundation Server, GitHub Standard Data Formats: HL7 (v2.x, CDA, FHIR), XML, JSON, YAML, EDI Development Tools: Embarcadero RAD Studio, MS Visual Studio (including .NET), Cache Studio, Atom Collaboration Tools: SharePoint, Atlassian

Stay tuned for more insights in this blog post series where we cover a wide-range of topics about DSS’ 25-plus-year legacy of VistA support. For our next blog post, we discuss how we can deliver modern web services from VistA, today.