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CAST Management Visibility
Management Visibility
Why Visibility is Important to the IT Executive
The business world is growing more networked, global, and sophisticated with each
day. Not only must the systems that underpin business keep pace, but also the level
of professionalism in managing IT. The key trends that signal a new age in managing
application delivery are:
- Running IT as a business – Business leaders are asking IT managers to control
risk and demonstrate and quantify their direct contribution to the top- and bottom-line
- Sourcing flexibility – Always needing to do more with less, IT managers are
shifting resources frequently and far, increasing the need to monitor their teams
- Increasing complexity – Accretion of IT technologies, M&A integration and
product portfolios, with ever higher staff turnover, complicate the delivery of
innovation
Why Output from Development Defies Visibility
Quality conscious IT managers cannot adequately examine the state or progress of
application development, both in new projects and on-going maintenance. There are
several reasons that contribute:
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Root Cause |
Impact on visibility |
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Complex, obscure applications |
- Risks to the business are difficult to estimate and manage
- Hard to predict how long projects should take
- Hard to assess impact of proposed software changes
- Can’t foresee quality issues in distributed components
- Hard to properly match skills with upcoming projects
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Long, complex and hurried projects |
- Assessing actual, versus self-reported, progress impossible until final testing,
increasing timeline and delivery risk
- Difficult to achieve consistent adherence to frameworks that ensure robust and secure
software
- Impact of output on future complexity is unknown
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Fluctuating and geographically distributed teams |
- Tracking quality, productivity, and progress is obstructed by distance and inaccessibility
- Outsourced teams can be opaque in terms of delivery
- Resources shift between systems, there’s no method to manage hand-offs and ensure
smooth transferability
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The CAST Solution – Effortless Transparency
CAST enables continual and objective assessment of the technical quality of applications
being delivered to the business. Technical quality can degrade performance, drive
up maintenance cost, and at worst bring down the production system. Completely automated,
CAST audits code at check-in against best-in-class practices and against a subroutine-level
mapping of the systems landscape. It’s like thousands of proof-readers who are collectively
aware of how each piece of new code interacts with the rest of the business system.
With CAST, IT managers can:
- Immediately see quality issues introduced into their business systems
- Objectively assess business risk & project complexity
- Institute balanced, actionable metrics in the development organization
The CAST Application Intelligence Platform automatically generates the visibility
managers need to measure, control, and improve application internal quality and
development team performance. The CAST platform provides executives the metrics
and information needed to better manage and support development teams, whether outsourced,
internal, or both.
The ROI of Visibility
Customers report measurable value in many areas, related to increased visibility
into development outcomes. Some of the reported value is categorized under the Software Quality and
Team Performance sections. Specific to visibility, testimonials can
be summarized in the following categories:
- Ability to track outsourcer effort by revision leads to a foundation of transparency
with vendors – improving the relationship, reducing risk, and producing savings
of 5-50% on change requests.
- Having objective KPIs for the performance of the organization generates ability
to reward high-achievers and generally raises productivity (up to 10%) and management
credibility.
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