The value of application assessment

Whether constructing, enhancing, or simply maintaining a complex business system, it pays to monitor the level of Technical Quality being built in along the way. Technical Quality ensures a sound foundation for the application – helping you eliminate many risks to the business, related to system stability and security. An application that is well designed, structured and programmed is less risky to the business, less costly to maintain and faster to build upon.

The notion of assessing Technical Quality is not new – many IT organizations conduct architectural and code reviews on their critical systems. The problem is that such reviews are hard to carry out, due to organizational and resourcing constraints, making it difficult for IT managers to proactively manage the foundational quality of their applications.

The value of assessment automation

The industry for application assessment automation is maturing with each day. It is no longer necessary to rely on the occasional manual review, when the IT organization can install a solution that will automate this process for all critical applications. Access to continual, automated assessment can help you ensure that quality is built into your systems with every developer contribution – whether you are building from scratch or enhancing legacy applications.

Continual application assessment allows IT managers to establish more consistent, repeatable delivery of end product to the business. Quality assessments become objective and always up to date. Quality metrics become consistent across technologies and across the organization; and continuous measurement of quality leads to continuous organizational improvement.

How CAST is unique

CAST is the global leader in providing application assessment automation. Of all the solutions available to this task, CAST is the only solution that can automate an architectural review in addition to code component reviews. CAST’s robust technology – the Application Intelligence Platform – can assess the most complex of business applications in a holistic manner, and from its design to its execution.

Normally, implementation of an enterprise-wide application assessment solution would entail a great deal of effort and time. Aided by the experience of hundreds of installations across many different environments, CAST’s implementation process is robust and highly automated. Once the source code, DDL, scripting languages, configuration files, and other such material is assembled, CAST can be set up within days, sometimes hours, to assess the entire complex application. Once set up, the assessment can be ongoing and relatively effortless!

How it works – the technology

In the course of assessing the application, CAST interprets all tiers (UI, logic, data) at the source code level to form an architectural blueprint of the application. To do this, CAST employs dedicated Programming Language Analyzers that are optimized for specific languages and can be tuned to your environment. Each analyzer parses code both on the server and client sides, performing a syntactic and semantic analysis of the source code. CAST’s advanced source code analysis technology is designed to scale up easily with the complexity of software development environments and the systems under assessment.

CAST is available for all major programming languages, databases and integration middleware used in enterprise applications today. For those languages not natively supported, CAST provides a Universal Analyzer (UA) that can be configured to that language – which is the primary approach taken by most other source code analyzers on the market. Out of the box, CAST natively handles 26 unique languages, including:

• Server and client tiers: Java/J2EE, .NET, C, Pro C, C++, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, ASP, Delphi, Oracle Forms, COBOL, JCL, and several scripting languages
• Database tier: All major SQL variants
• Specific environments: Tibco, BusinessObjects, CICS, IMS, SAP/ABAP

Use automation to attain delivery excellence

Whether struggling with a problematic application that’s inhibiting the business, or looking for ways to improve your organizational agility. Application assessment automation is a valuable tool to improve your systems baseline and continuously upgrade your organization’s performance. Placing Application Intelligence at the fingertips of everyone in your organization will help your development teams be more effective, while endowing IT management with the metrics they need to run application delivery as a business.