Category: Risk & Security

We just finished up the 30-minute webinar where Dr. Bill Curtis, our Chief Scientist, described some of the findings that are about to be published by CAST Research Labs. The CRASH (CAST Research on Application Software Health) report for 2014 is chock full of new data on software risk, code quality and technical debt. We expect the initial CRASH report to be produced in the next month, and based on some of the inquiries we’ve received so far, we will probably see a number of smaller follow-up studies come out of the 2014 CRASH data.

This year’s CRASH data that we saw Bill present is based on 1316 applications, comprising 706 million lines of code – a pretty large subset of the overall Appmarq repository.  This means the average application in the sample was 536 KLOC. We’re talking big data for BIG apps here. This is by far the biggest repository of enterprise IT code quality and technical debt research data. Some of the findings presented included correlations between the health factors – we learned that Performance Efficiency is pretty uncorrelated to other health factors and that Security is highly correlated to software Robustness. We also saw how the health factor scores were distributed across the sample set and the differences in structural code quality by outsourcing, offshoring, Agile and CMMI level.

The software architecture is one of the most important artifacts created in the lifecycle of an application. Architectural decisions directly impact the achievement of business goals, as well as functional and quality requirements. Yet once the architecture has been designed, most architectural descriptions are seldom verified or maintained over time. Architecture compliance checking is a sound application risk management strategy that can detect deviations between the intended architecture and the implemented architecture.

As technology increasingly becomes the backbone of business, it is also becoming the single most expensive asset within any organization—bringing the topic straight to the boardroom. What most of us may not appreciate is that the custom software being built for enterprises has surpassed a threshold of complexity that would allow for any one person to understand an entire mission-critical system. And, unlike any other part of our critical infrastructure, there is no single manager who is responsible and accountable for the integrity of a company’s software backbone.