You need an application delivered fast. And you’re willing to pay more to get it done quickly. But how much more should you pay?

That depends of course on your supplier’s productivity. The more productive they are, the more they can charge on a per-hour basis. That’s because their productivity enables them to deliver the same size application in fewer hours than a less productive supplier would be able to. Which means that the cost to deliver a function point (function point per $) might actually be less than a supplier whose labor rates are much lower!  In other words, a supplier with a higher labor cost can actually be more cost efficient – and at the end of the day, this output metric – cost efficiency – is what matters. (Along with application quality, as we'll see a bit later.)

Sometime last year, Netflix began using  Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run their immensely successful video streaming business.  They moved their entire source of revenue to the cloud. They are now totally reliant on the performance of AWS.

While former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld never spoke or wrote about software (as far as I know), his quip about unknown unknowns during the early months of the Iraq war is well known.

No matter what you think of Rumsfeld, his classification applies nicely to software and teaches us a lesson or two about building good software.

Major stock exchanges suffering embarrassing technology breakdowns that have left some traders resorting to placing trades over old-fashioned phone lines! What next, ticker tape?

This week, Bill Curtis, SVP & Chief Scientist at CAST will be delivering a keynote presentation at CONSEG 2011 in Bangalore, India.

The intensity and speed of Agile development puts a premium on satisfying the functional requirements of business users. But this intense focus comes at the expense of structural quality.

There are plenty of "...for dummies" materials out there. This one is for smarties. So buckle up!

A couple of weeks ago, Dave West, Principal Analyst from Forrester and I had a chat about Agile.

In about 3 weeks (January 27th, to be precise), we'll be featuring Dave West, Principal Analyst at Forrester on a webinar.  Stay tuned for the announcement and the link to register.

Technical Debt. You've probably heard about it. You may have read about it. But should you be doing anything about it?

It all depends on how Technical Debt is defined. It could just be a scare or it could really sink you! Depending on how you define it, it may be very large, forcing you to pay attention.

October 26th marked CAST's second annual Partner Conference. It was packed, with more than double the number of attendees this year compared to 2009.

On Wednesday, October 20 at 8:30 AM, our SVP, Chief Scientist, and Head of CAST Research Labs, Dr. Bill Curtis keynoted the TesTrek conference in Toronto, Canada.

How do you scale Agile for the enterprise? Hear Rebecca Parsons of ThoughtWorks and Bill Curtis of CAST discuss the keys to scaling Agile techniques --the metrics and processes that are required to take the next leap in Agile.

I've been surfing the booths at the Gartner Outsourcing & Vendor Management Summit in sunny, gorgeous Orlando (check out some pictures on Twitter).

To mark the event, CAST is giving away an iPad. To enter the drawing, take our sourcing survey.

On September 28th we have Dr. Rebecca Parsons, CTO  of ThoughtWorks and Dr. Bill Curtis, Chief Scientist at CAST as panelists on a webinar on Agile practices.

As overheard by Dr. Bill Curtis at last week's Agile Conference. Coined by Jeff Sutherland, one of the co-inventors of SCRUM.

On August 4, 2010 CAST hosted an IT executive luncheon, bringing together leading Atlanta-area companies. Leading the discussion was The Coca-Cola Company, elaborating on how they measure quality and the velocity of change in their code base and use these metrics to deliver faster, at higher quality and lower cost.

Bill presented the 10 commandments of multisourcing covering governance, SLAs, and best practices. Here are some salient points from his presentation.

Seldom do the worlds of mainstream network television programming and IT collide. But when they do … it’s comedy. Or at least NBC thinks so. The network is promoting a sitcom called ‘Outsourced’ about an American thirty-something who goes to India to manage a call-center.  Inevitably, comedic culture clashes ensue. Cringe-worthy clip here (SFW but not funny).

Industry data demonstrate that code reviews are highly effective.

C.K. Chesterton wrote, “The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his mother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."

Software quality is getting hard to measure and automated quality measurement is the only way to go.  That's the news from our IBM Innovate2010 quality survey. Complete survey results are on Slideshare.

Carol Poulsen,  Senior Vice President, Group Architecture, Innovation and Solution Delivery Services, Royal Bank of Canada. Thanks for participating Carol!

For the third year in a row, CAST is pleased to be featured as a key IBM business partner at IBM Innovate 2010. Come visit us in pedestal “L” in the partner pavilion to see Rational and CAST AIP in action!

I heard from an old friend, Shyam Nadig,  who had a question about the previous post -- in particular, how the CAST for ERP solutions compare with products like SAP's Solution Manager.

Running an ERP system? Having any of these problems?

Join me and Tony Timbol of David Consulting Group on Thursday, May 13 for a joint DCG-CAST Webinar.

Have your applications behaved erratically in front of your most valued customers? Has the stress of everyday operations caused your applications to suffer complete breakdowns? Dr. Bill Curtis can help!

What's the biggest cultural change that companies who use CAST undergo?

If you're like most (don't deny it), here's how you do resource estimation for IT projects.

I recently sat down with Fritz Nelson of InformationWeek and walked him through a demo of CAST.

A recent Booz Allen economic study highlights two key drivers of cost savings in a cloud environment: the speed at which you migrate your applications to the cloud and the extent to which you can reduce the internally-managed infrastructure supporting these migrated applications. The faster the better; the greater the reduction of internally-managed infrastructure the better.

Corner of 26th St. and 6th Ave in NYC at 2 AM? Good to be big!

Because CAST's quality metrics are a unique and vital addition to IBM Insight.

Run Your Apps Through C-A-S-T!

Kickoff 2010! Every year, the entire company gathers in one physical location to strengthen relationships, forge new ones, and internalize CAST's values and goals. Kickoff 2010 was super! I was delighted to meet some good friends and make many new ones.  The intelligence and creativity of CAST folks is impressive -- no wonder we are THE Application Intelligence company.

Data from IBM below shows striking failure rates on the requirements for PCI compliance (it's from 2008, but nothing gives me any confidence that companies actually got better at this in 2009).

Speaking of software productivity, Peter Cohan of AOL's Daily Finance recently wrote about how automated software quality measurement improves IT productivity and in turn, business productivity.

Read it here.

Because CAST's quality metrics are a unique and vital addition to IBM Insight.

Yesterday CAST  hosted a breakfast for IT leaders in government agencies - one of the themes was moving applications to the Cloud.  I was surprised (and relieved) to see so many agencies represented - FEMA, DHS, SEC, NASA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency just to name a few. 

Back in August of 2008,  the FAA reported significant software configuration problems when a software glitch delayed dozens and dozens of national flights. The outage directly affected traffic and ground personnel; cargo had to be manually loaded, and flight plan information manually entered into the system by air traffic controllers. According to an FAA spokesperson, the source of the malfunction was a "packet switch" that "failed due to a database mismatch".