The Problem

Losing control over your outsourced applications
After a few months into outsourcing, IT organizations gradually lose visibility over the quality of the applications being developed, and the applications themselves

With systems becoming increasingly complex, the situation can easily lead to:

This is especially manifest when key development and architectural practices are not fully followed by the outsourcing partner. The business impact of this lack of control is often reflected by escalating live testing and change request costs and mainly translates into one thing: greater risk and less predictability.

The Solution

Automated code review for greater visibility
The outsourcers must be held accountable for their deliveries but that can only be done if you have a way to manage and measure what is being delivered in an objective manner. CAST enables continual and objective assessment of the internal quality of applications being delivered to the business. The CAST Application Intelligence Platform, relying on advanced source code analysis technology, is designed to help AD organizations audit and challenge supplier deliverables.

Monitor compliance with Best Practices and Guidelines
With CAST, you can automatically monitor compliance with development best practices and architectural guidelines. In fact IT managers can easily measure applications against a set of quality rules pertaining to architecture, documentation, performance, naming conventions, best practices and more while looking at the trends across teams or the same teams over time.

Reduce risks from poor quality and maintainability
CAST software provides the visibility to better measure, control and improve application development through application health factors displayed in a Web interface, the CAST AD Governance Dashboard. These measurements show the health of the application in terms of its transferability, changeability, robustness (stability & testability), performance, security and maintainability. To measure rule compliance, CAST built programming best practices, architectural design and technical documentation measurements. CAST also tracks productivity (quantity) or the amount of work that has been done including technical size and functional weight.

Lower unexpected costs associated with Change Requests
With CAST software, you can analyze the work delivered, optimize costs and improve future delivery by automatically monitoring the complexity and maintainability of your applications - across all tiers and with drill-down capabilities - to best understand the information being provided. CAST can provide estimated costs and effort by comparing versions of an application over time (or benchmarking) broken down by levels of complexity and offer insight on how resource intensive a future change should be. Indeed the more complex an object is, the more time and effort/cost it will take to modify and test it.

Avoid Vendor Lock-in
To fully reap the benefits of outsourced development in a global sourcing environment, CAST helps you move fast to save costs and reduce risks. CAST products ease the transfer of an application from one team to another, helping new personnel to easily find their way within a large amount of source code.

With CAST, you always have access the technical Knowledge Base (repository of all the meta-data collected). This provides real-time documentation, in case you eventually plan to bring the application back in-house or safely transfer it to another outsourcer.