Delivering late and over budget
Poorly-implemented architectures, bad programming practice, overly complex code, non-conformance to company standards – these are just a few of the issues that often result in unsuccessful projects and higher maintenance costs. As applications become more and more complex overall, the risk of failure in production, performance issues and rising maintenance cost seem to have no end in sight.

Most companies that build and maintain custom applications recognize the value of effective quality control processes and testing to ensure their applications perform as required. However even with these investments in testing automation, application quality remains a tremendous problem.

Quality is more than just testing the application, it is knowing what the application looks like on the inside to understand architectural flaws, security issues and assess risks of unanticipated problems before they occur. Architecture and coding issues can also have severe impact in production or inflate maintenance costs not even showing up under traditional testing efforts.

The result?
True Technical Quality review is often “sacrificed” to speed delivery to the business and defects are left in the application due to trade-offs at acceptance time, exposing business to the risk of a truly catastrophic failure.

The "real" cost?
"Software bugs, or errors, are so prevalent and so detrimental that they cost the US economy an estimated $59.5 billion annually" as highlighted in an NIST study.*

Controlling the quality delivered
Typical quality measures - lines of code versus defects, numbers of problems encountered in production… - are not enough to fully grasp the Technical Quality and future maintainability of applications.

The CAST Application Intelligence Platform allows development team leaders and release managers to audit applications – 100% of the code, all tiers – and quickly identify areas for improvement for the developers to work on. Non-compliant objects are immediately identified for rapid remedy. Major maintainability drifts are identified upfront and corrected.

Health checks on your existing applications
CAST automates the collection of objective technical information about applications - summarized under Application Health Factors - and information based on industry-standard formulas (metric calculations). This information is delivered via a Web interface (the AD Governance Dashboard) to provide intuitive dynamic reports, charts and drill-down capabilities.

Enforce both coding and architecture rules during development
By analyzing all tiers of a complex application, CAST measures quality and adherence to architectural and coding standards, while providing visual specification models. Because all CAST analysis results are stored and combined in a single knowledge base, managers can control coding rules across all layers of an application (including UI, Business and Data and architecture rules). CAST software covers over 600 coding best practices and architecture standards rules.

Action-oriented assessments for easy correction
Reengineering decisions are often hard to make like selecting which application would be a good candidate for future improvements. With CAST, your development team leaders provide objective actionable information to their development teams, for immediate remedy. Development teams can be alerted early on and precisely know what they need to improve, thanks to the comprehensive reports listing all defaulting artifacts for each rule.

Better quality towards lower maintenance costs
Understanding where the inefficiencies are is often one of the first steps in a cost reduction initiative. CAST helps IT managers assess, monitor, compare and control the maintainability, quality and evolution costs of the entire application portfolio – from release to release, throughout their lifecycle. IT managers can then focus their attention on addressing the real issues that stand in the way of doing more with their application assets, such as:

• consolidating redundant modules
• fixing overly-complex applications that cost too much to maintain
• improving poor quality software modules that cause application downtime
• redeploy underused Applications staff on new projects

* http://www.nist.gov/director/prog-ofc/report02-3.pdf