The Cognosante project team leveraged expertise in cloud migration and WebTA — combined with knowledge of VA’s cloud environment and legacy timekeeping system — to migrate VATAS from on-premises to the VA Enterprise Cloud (VAEC). The team then needed to deploy GovTA, WebTA’s replacement product, which required significant development to migrate a decade of VATAS customizations and interfaces. It also needed to meet congressionally mandated accessibility requirements for the visually impaired. Cognosante worked closely with the vendor to ensure compliance by developing test capabilities and certifying staff in Section 508 requirements.
To ensure the WebTA product remained available to users while the new GovTA product was being tailored to VA’s needs, the team stood up and maintained parallel test, pre-production, training, and production environments for the two applications.
In addition, Cognosante built a GovTA “sandbox” environment (two months ahead of schedule). This approach mitigated risk and gave VA business users additional time to review and test the application’s functionality, understand its new look and feel, and provide feedback to the development team, reducing the overall GovTA development schedule by four months.