Application development has experienced rapid evolution in recent years, e.g. more and more complex projects, increased collaboration, globalization, outsourcing, offshore/nearshore expansion, SOA, Web 2.0 and Open Source. There is no question that a developer's job in today's world is very different from what it was even 5 years ago.

The post-bubble effect has resulted in ROI-driven CIOs who are required to do more with less. Additionally, in a world which is smaller and better connected, big offshore players are pushing CIOs to use global resources with the result being that teams are split across continents and time zones and sometimes even different languages.

In this business environment, companies need to address many rapidly-changing factors which include: customer requirements, M&A, partnership imperatives, increased competition, increased regulation, etc. As a result, business is moving faster than ever.

If you take the automotive industry, over a 90-year timeframe it has changed dramatically from a world dominated by the individual craftsman to a mass-production industrial environment governed by well-recognized quality standards (operations research, total quality management, reengineering, Six Sigma, etc). In comparison, the software industry is only just beginning to fully recognize and embrace the need for similar “industrialized” quality standards.

In view of today’s challenges, and maturity of software development, today’s CIOs must:

The Fortune 500 and large Systems Integrators & Outsourcers are working hard to reduce costs (hence the dramatic increase in the use of offshore resources) and industrialization (quality improvement) of application management services. The combination of the two must be integrated into every single application development project so that the project remains as efficient as possible without sacrificing quality – a sort of software supply chain.

CAST can play a big role in this new supply chain by delivering the means to automatically and objectively measure the Technical Quality at its various hand-offs. Providing the instrumentation to measure supply chain performance, CAST is contributing to a significant increase in application development maturity levels.

It is well-known in the history of industrialization that the inflection point in the maturity of any industry comes with the measurement of what people do, how they do it and of the final outcome. CAST enables this measurement:

Additionally, once CAST has assessed an application, the CAST Application Intelligence Platform provides highly-detailed technical documentation about the application inner-structure which can then be distributed via a Web portal. Application Intelligence is made available to everybody in seconds, is always up-to-date, helps technical teams in critical situations (knowledge transfer, discovery, knowledge sharing etc) and removes a large part of the risk related to staff turnover and vendor lock in.

CAST strongly believes that industrialization and globalization will soon make Automated Application Intelligence an absolute must-have. It is also believed that Application Intelligence - the delivery of valuable information about software applications to all in IT organizations - is a concept that will eventually become as widespread in IT as business intelligence is among business managers. AI brings enormous value to important Application Management activities while Application Management consumes 75% of Application Development resources and budgets. These activities comprise pro-active management of application quality and team performance/Outsourcing Management, but also integration and upgrade of software packages, automated Application Documentation, change management and all AD activities that require intelligence about an application. CAST, as a pioneer, is face