If you already have some knowledge of Technical Debt, this ebook provides a 7-step Technical Debt Management Cycle that provides a clear process that can over time reduce the risk of failure of critical applications---and ultimately pay down the interest of the overall liability inherent in your application portfolio.

For those with responsibility to govern the costs and risks of application portfolios, the financial metaphor “Technical Debt” helps us think about software quality in business terms.  This paper includes a formula to benchmark your Technical Debt against industry data, or adjust the parameters to best fit your organization’s own maintenance and structural quality objectives, experiences, and costs.  It also details the “Technical Debt Management Cycle” for analyzing and measuring Technical Debt so you can relate executive business priorities to strategic quality priorities for reducing business risk and IT cost.

Technical Debt has been growing exponentially as maintenance is starved and development teams are forced to cut corners to meet increasingly unrealistic delivery schedules. CAST clearly defines Technical Debt so it can be measured and then juxtaposed with the business value of applications to inform critical tradeoffs between delivery agility and business risk.

The World Quality Report is a result of ongoing collaboration between Capgemini Group (Capgemini and Sogeti) and HP Software, presenting findings from a global survey completed online by over 1,200 business and IT executives and managers around the globe. The report examines the state of application quality and testing practices across different industries and geographies, and includes a contribution from CAST on Technical Debt in Business Applications.

Learn how the Lean practices pioneered in the Toyota Production System apply to the Application Development and Maintenance (ADM) of business software.  Applying Lean to ADM decreases total cost of ownership and improves business responsiveness and operational dependability.

Some application developers have embraced quality data when used for improvement and self-evaluation, as opposed to performance evaluation.  Access and review of this type of information allows for continual improvement in both the business value of the application and the professional capability of the developer. Comprehensive quality data empowers developers to take charge of the quality of their work and the service it delivers.

CMMI is not an application quality standard, and therefore does not directly address factors that degrade application quality or critical quality attributes of an application such as maintainability, robustness and efficiency.  Application quality analysis identifies software quality problems to supplement CMMI-based development practices to produce high quality applications.

Security is just one aspect of an application’s health, and you risk vulnerability by looking at security in isolation. Learn the importance of focusing on the complete health of an application (Transferability, Changeability, Robustness, Performance, and Maintainability) to reduce risk associated with a lack of internal quality.

IBM Rational Team Concert helps teams meet the challenges of software and systems delivery by allowing them to collaborate more effectively in the context of their current activities.  CAST adds a layer of application intelligence to the Rational Team Concert platform to help run application delivery as a business.

There is a lot of talk within the world of application development about governance, quality and dashboards and Project Portfolio Management, Functional Testing and Performance Testing can address some of these needs.  However. none effectively evaluate the internal quality of an application.  The CAST Application Intelligence Platform complements many of these solutions by automatically analyzing application source code and providing the metrics and information needed for Code Quality Management, Application Portfolio Management and Development Performance Management.

Poor application quality causes highly-visible major outages and the loss of business revenue; it also causes ongoing lapses in business performance that are less visible, but steadily add up to substantial revenue loss. This paper presents a quantitative framework for measuring the immediate and positive revenue impact of proactively improving application quality.

It is long overdue to measure application development and maintenance by the same standards as the rest of the business-- how WELL developers do their work, and not how MUCH work they do.  The applications delivered by IT provide significant competitive differentiation and we therefore must understand the real quality of work being done by application development teams and what return is being realized from the investment.

Quality is not an intrinsic property of code: the exact same piece of code can be excellent in quality or highly dangerous depending on the context in which it operates. Analyzing the quality of modern applications in the context of its numerous interconnections can only be accomplished with automated software that analyzes the inner structure of all components and evaluates their interactions in the context of the entire application.