CAVAMAC

Sector

Banking, insurance

Activity

CAVAMAC manages three social security schemes for the benefit of general insurance agents: their basic retirement pension, their complementary retirement pension and their disability / death insurance. It was established by the law of January 17, 1948, and is one of the ten professional sections of the French national retirement provision fund for liberal professions (CNAVPL). As a private company carrying out public service missions, CAVAMAC is subject to the control of public authorities.

The project at a glance

For 15 years, CAVAMAC has been relying on a tailored application, developed in RPG for the back-office part and in Java for the HMIs, to manage basic retirement pensions, complementary retirement pensions and disability / death insurance for general insurance agents. The solution has undergone various enhancements to adapt to external requirements and to needs identified internally by the directors and professions.

Due to the retirement pension reform of 2010, CAVAMAC is required to feed data into the RGCU, an inter-scheme tool the purpose of which is centralize all the career data for each person benefiting from social security, in order to facilitate calculation of retirement pensions. This obligation to feed data into the RGCU required implementation of a major enhancement of the application, and led the fund to consider the application’s long-term future, on a technical level and also relating to internal skills. 

Two scenarios were envisaged: deployment of the PICRIS business software package, or conservation of the IBM i system. To take this decision, CAVAMAC assigned Hardis Group the task of performing a tool-based external audit.

This Application Healthcheck enabled us to objectively assess the quality of the code in our legacy application. Using reference metrics, we were able to confirm that the RPG programs and the development processes on IBM i more than met our objectives in terms of code quality and security, traceability and separation of responsibilities.“ —Maryse Gauthier, manager of the CAVAMAC IT department.

Project objectives

  • Draw up an objective inventory of the existing legacy application.
  • Assess the application’s capability to change to meet regulatory requirements
  • Determine whether the internal organization and skills of the fund would enable it to enhance its IS without external assistance.
  • Determine the areas requiring enhancement in the event the scenario for keeping the existing application was adopted

Work performed

  • Tool-based audit of the legacy application: assessment of the RPG programs using a certain number of ARCAD Software tools, and analysis of the Java source code using SonarQube.
  • Organization of three workshops to become familiar with the human and application-related context. 
  • Delivery of the results in just four weeks. 
  • Definition of an action plan for the technical enhancements to be implemented.

Benefits

  • Objective assessment of the legacy application code quality.
  • Information about the long-term viability of the legacy application assets in terms of quantity and quality.
  • Capability to take a quick well-informed decision
  • Identification and prioritization of areas requiring enhancement. 
  • Re-use of deliverables for the half-yearly audit carried out by the CNAVPL

Any project?