One of the most vexing problems in software engineering is measuring the amount of progress made in developing or maintaining a software product. By its very nature, fulfilling business functionality is binary – either it is complete or not. However, any attempt to accurately estimate resources and timelines requires a measure of the degree to which progress is made in developing, enhancing, or maintaining an application.

CAST’s ability to quantify both quality and progress (not just the time spent) gives you the best visibility over the performance of your software factory. Productivity without quality is a waste; quality without productivity is costly! Performance is achieved when both quality and productivity increase simultaneously.

When IT managers talk about team performance, they often speak of productivity. At CAST, we take a balanced view of performance to include the quality and quantity of work produced. A high-performing team should deliver on time, on budget, and on quality. A high-performing team should be able to architect and construct good code without going through much rework, while focusing its energies on meeting the functional needs of the business.

The ability to precisely locate the root causes of Application Software Quality lapses during development is the best training money can buy. The ability to objectively quantify Application Software Quality provides an actionable path for improving team performance.

With CAST, the organization learns together. Instead of spending valuable time on training courses, which are often forgotten a few weeks later, you can spend time learning on your own projects that are in flight. CAST provides the Applications team with the resources to construct very high quality applications, by reliably finding problems, and providing precise guidance on how to fix them once and for all, right from the start.

In addition, CAST provides the Applications team with specific tools to map and explore the evolving architecture of the system. When potential performance bottlenecks are detected – whether in the source code or in the live system – CAST helps your team to quickly remediate the issues. All this, while storing an electronic version of your system’s architecture landscape documentation so it can be easily transferred from one team to another.

By measuring and managing the performance of the software factory, our customers report value gains in two key areas:

• Lower cost of maintenance, in terms of team time spent, as the application software quality improves with every “touch” of the code. Maintenance costs decline by as much as 5% per year.
• Higher team productivity due to increased component reuse and use of frameworks. Helping teams identify reuse opportunities, while allowing managers to improve reuse, can reduce the development budget by 5% - 10%.

1. What should we improve and by how much?
   • How globally dispersed should my team be?
   • What is the ideal project size for optimal SDLC throughput?
   • Which business unit applications have the lowest productivity?
   • What is the ideal team size on a project?
   • Which types of applications have the highest/lowest productivity?
2. Where do our efficiency bottlenecks lie?
   • Quickly identify the projects to focus on by plotting all projects of equal size against the number of effort hours. Variance in effort is a key indicator of process efficiency problems.
   • Accurately identify the root causes of quality problems and quickly fix them.
   • Measure improvements in quality to quantify the effectiveness of remediation activities.

Company Overview | Application Software Quality | Software Factory Performance | Management Visibility