Evaluate Vendor Deliverables

When outsourcing Application Development and Maintenance (ADM), many companies find themselves falling into a reactive mode of management. The tendency is to rely on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that focus almost exclusively on testing and live application performance in production, without any insight into the quality of the product itself.  

So what is the result of relying upon inadequate SLAs to manage outsourcers?

After a few months into outsourcing, IT organizations gradually lose visibility over the quality of the applications being developed, and eventually the applications themselves. 

This situation can easily lead to:

  • Decreased quality.
  • Delayed project deliverables.
  • Insufficient deliveries.
  • Heightened security risk.
  • Locked-in resources.
  • Increased maintenance costs.

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.

 

CAST Makes the Invisible Visible

Outsourced teams must be held accountable for their deliveries, which can only be done if you have a way to manage and measure their output in an objective manner. CAST enables continual and objective assessment of the Technical Quality of applications being delivered to the business.

The CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP), relying on advanced source code analysis technology, is designed to help IT organizations to create a transparent and objective relationship with suppliers. No other product on the market provides the depth, breadth and scope of analysis available with the CAST AIP.


Data-driven Guidance to Manage Outsourcing Relationships

  • Automated code review for greater visibility
  • Specified metrics and guidelines for outsourcing governance
  • Factual information to manage outsourcing relationship
  • Transparent effort estimation to de-risk the sourcing negotiation
  • Objective measurement of outcomes to get a handle on change request costs
  • Reduced risk of problems experienced by the business
  • Shorter Quality Assurance “time-to-acceptance”
  • Increased agility and responsiveness to end-users needs
  • Optimized maintainability to ensure ongoing responsiveness
  • Heightened transferability of software, guarding against lock-in to specific resources

CAST AIP provides tangible savings across the IT supply chain. Applying lean principles to application development can lead to at least a 10+%  overall cost and risk reduction, mostly based on waste elimination and driving desired behavior among AD teams. We have a mature and proven ROI model, and have real world examples of hard dollar savings from major clients who have scientifically measured the benefits from defect prevention.