Progress in Developing the Disability Case Processing System as of August 2017
- Audit report number
- A-14-17-50221
- Management challenge
- Modernize Information Technology
- Full report
- /~assets/audits/full/a-14-17-50221.pdf
- Summary report
- /~assets/audits/summary/summary-50221.pdf
Our objective was to evaluate the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) progress in developing and implementing its Disability Case Processing System (DCPS) as of August 2017.
DCPS is an SSA initiative to develop a common system for all State disability determination services (DDS), which the Agency expects will simplify system support and maintenance, improve the speed and quality of the disability process, and reduce the overall growth rate of infrastructure costs.
SSA is using an Agile approach to developing DCPS. The Agency continually identifies functional requirements, which are expressed as user stories. Each user story is assigned a level of effort, called a story point. Velocity refers to the number of story points completed during an iteration, or 'sprint." User stories that need to be addressed are considered the backlog.
In December 2016, SSA released its first working software to three DDSs, enabling them to process certain types of disability claims. Since the December 2016 DCPS release, SSA has deployed two more major releases that provided additional functionality.
