Research Library

The Forrester Wave™: Static Application Security Testing, Q4 2017
CAST Was Named A Strong Performer In The Forrester Wave™: Static Application Security Testing, Q4 2017
Analyst Paper
Mitigate Business Risk And Unlock Software Potential With Contextual Software Analysis
Cutter Consortium research on how organizations deliver resilient, responsive, and secure applications while preventing business risks. Cutter explains how Contextual Software Analysis analyzes all components of a software to create intelligence about the system, find ways to unlock its potential, and identify possible vulnerabilities… 
Analyst Paper
Mitigating Software-Related Business Risk Requires Systems Perspective

Cutter Consortium paper about how digital leaders drive down business risks borne from complex software. Cutter shows how industrializing software risk management unleashes organizational intelligence to improve application delivery, while ensuring business risk is baked out of applications, putting both human and software intelligence to their best use.

Analyst Paper
Forrester Research: Maintaining Vendor Management Vigilance In The Overheated Global Sourcing Market

To improve transparency, companies are using software analysis tools to evaluate externally developed code and ensure that it meets certain coding and productivity standards.  This report is for forward-looking IT Sourcing, Contracting, Vendor Management, VMO, IT Finance professionals looking to greatly improve the maturity in vendor-client relationships.  

Analyst Paper
Forrester Research: The Six Most Meaningful Metrics To mprove App Dev’s Business Value

Failure to consider quality requirements results in Technical Debt — the need to rework something in the future based on your failure to pay for it now. Software analysis tools, such as CAST, mine source code to uncover errors, development shortcuts, and complexity all of which contribute to Technical Debt.

Analyst Paper
Gartner Research: How To Monetize Application Technical Debt

Read exclusive analysis from Andy Kyte, Gartner VP and Fellow, on the systemic risk in the typical application portfolio caused by the accumulation of Technical Debt.

Analyst Paper
Gartner Research: Software Risk Management: A Primer For IT Executives

Many organizations use risk management to mitigate delivery risk, typically at the expense of application quality. Learn about the importance of focusing on application structural quality to reduce business disruption risk in this Gartner-CAST paper

Analyst Paper
Gartner Research: Cool Vendors In Application Services

Gartner Research’s paper on improving application services contracting. “Organization’s that outsources custom development should care about CAST, which has become the de facto standard for measuring the quality and productivity of vendor deliveries.” Paper is relevant to IT Sourcing, Contracting, Vendor Management, VMO, and IT Finance professionals.

Analyst Paper
Gartner Research: The Three Dimensions Of Application Development Quality

A formal approach to quality management is needed that recognizes the key dimensions of quality (Stakeholders, Technical Quality, Functional Quality), and a set of measures that enable the organization to identify areas for improvement and focus on the specific changes that they can make successfully.

Analyst Paper
Gartner Research - Measuring Code Quality In Application Sourcing

This paper features Gartner research and related content from CAST, detailing the three main focus areas to implement a successful SAM program with your vendors, as well as a client example of a large telecom firm that used SAM to lower IT costs and gain visibility into vendor performance.

Analyst Paper
Gartner Effective APA - Unlock Business-Driven Sourcing Strategies

This paper, featuring Gartner research and related content from CAST, delivers recommendations to successfully execute a lightweight, sustainable portfolio analysis that improves overall software risk management, whether applications are managed in-house or by vendors.

Analyst Paper
SWOT Assessment - CAST Application Intelligence Platform

Ovum research on the CAST Application Intelligence Platform. This research is a thorough review of CAST AIP, with some comments about its strengths in providing in-depth, holistic view of all application component interactions, for assessment of integration issues as well as simple code quality and complexity analysis.

Analyst Paper
Cloud migration 2.0: shifting priorities for application modernization in 2019
This report based on research and in-depth interviews with technology leaders from top banks, Insurers, Fin-tech & Telecom providers explore their initial approaches to cloud migration and lessons from the same. Armed with the battle scars of the past three to five years, software leaders are revisiting their near-term cloud migration plans.
Research Lab
Software Intelligence Report On CIO Priorities in the Digital Age

CAST recently surveyed 500 IT leaders, including 150 CIOs, 125 software architects and 125 application owners, at mid- to large-size organizations regarding their technology objectives and their ability to meet these goals based on the Software Intelligence they have around existing software portfolios.

This research exposes key areas where IT leaders lack Software Intelligence and digs deeper into top challenges as they look to meet the digital imperative while trimming IT costs, improving security and enabling the adoption of emerging technologies.

Research Lab
Software Intelligence Report On Application Age
The Software Intelligence Report on Application Age looks at 2,067 applications, representing 733 million lines of code from 14 different technologies that are developed and maintained by more than 12,000 people across multiple verticals. To conduct the analysis, these applications were anonymized and scanned by CAST Highlight. The report identifies two primary outcomes of application age:

  • Older applications are far more likely to impact service continuity in the event of a production failure.

  • The shift toward Agile development teams might not be helping organizations modernize as quickly as the industry anticipated.

Research Lab
Software Intelligence Report
Open source is part of almost every software capability we use today. This report reviews some of the most commonly used open source software projects, comparing them to each other and to enterprise IT. While it is good to take advantage of open source, we must ensure these foundations are Secure, Robust, Efficient and Maintainable.
Research Lab
The CRASH 2017 Report Trend on Application Security

This is first CRASH Report describing a distribution of security weaknesses from the Common Weakness Enumeration Repository across a global sample of business applications.

Research Lab
The CRASH 2017 Report on Application Security - Executive Summary

We’ve analyzed applications based on CWE standards for software security to better understand how secure applications are across industry, language, development methodology and more.

Research Lab
CRASH Benchmark Report 2015 – SAP

CAST research provides benchmarks on the structural quality of ABAP, the language used for customizing applications developed in SAP. The report provides benchmarks by industry sectors and geography. The report analyzes the frequency of severe violations to better understand remediation strategies for improving ABAP / SAP structural quality, performance, security and resiliency.

Research Lab
CRASH Report 2017 Executive Summary

We’ve analyzed more than 1,850 applications to better understand how application development and delivery practices impact IT and organizational performance.

We've looked at development methods, team maturity and size, sourcing and confirmed that we are doing some things right – but we still have some things to improve.

Research Lab
The CRASH Report 2016 On Insurance

This CAST report on global trends of structural quality of Insurance industry applications provides insight and benchmarks useful for IT executives. Detailed within are trends for five structural quality characteristics, or health factors, including Robustness, Security, Efficiency, Transferability and Changeability.  The report includes industry insights on Insurance technology challenges and opportunities from CGI.

Research Lab
CRASH Report 2016 on Financial-Services - Summary of key findings

Industry analysis on the global trends in Financial Services market’s structural quality of software. This report highlights trends in five structural quality characteristics, or health factors - Robustness, Security, Efficiency, Transferability, and Changeability.  Industry benchmark and trends analysis by technology, geography and more. 

Research Lab
The CRASH Report 2017 Global Trends In Software Structural Quality

CAST’s industry research and benchmarks on the structural quality of IT. This benchmark report was developed from 1850 applications across 329 organizations and 8 countries.  View research and benchmarks by development process (Agile, DevOps, Waterfall, Hybrid), geography, industry and by technology.

Research Lab
Essential Outcomes of Application Portfolio Assessment

Having trouble knowing when to retire an application? Want to rationalize but don’t know where to start? Thinking about moving to the Cloud?

Answering “Yes” to any of those questions means that, while you are on the right track, something might be going wrong. Essential Outcomes of Application Portfolio Assessment, our free eBook download, will help you understand how application portfolio assessment helps you – and maybe revolutionizes your development.

With so many changes in technology, our application portfolios are becoming larger and more complex than ever before – and you may need to make some changes in order to keep pushing forward.

White Paper
Open Source: How to maximize Open Source Software safely

Turn Security & License Risks into Innovation

Many Open Source licenses coexist in the software ecosystem. Before integrating a third-party piece of code, it is essential to ensure that your license complies with the intended distribution format. The risk here is essentially legal and financial;
White Paper
Top 5 Application Portfolio Health Mistakes

Inside this e-book, you will find out some of the most common Application Portfolio Health Mistakes, including:

  • Having too many applications;

  • Thinking maintenance is “Once and Done”;

  • You aren’t investing in security; and

  • Rushing the process

White Paper
Lift & Extend: Pragmatic Keys to Establish a Virtuous Circle for your Cloud Adoption Strategy
This document lists the key thoughts and steps that large organizations should implement across their application portfolio and teams, in order to establish a strong virtuous circle that will support their Cloud migration strategy that can scale globally. It's a Cloud adoption framework we could summarize in two words: Lift & Extend.
White Paper
3 Best Practices to Improve Software Outcomes in Digital Transformation
Financial Services (FS) firms consistently have systems which are less reliable and of poorer quality than other industries[1]. Many of us as customers of banks and other FS providers have experienced the frustration of systems and processes that fall short of our expectations, sometime dramatically so. And there have been many examples of major banking and payment system failures in the news over the years which cause huge frustration and hardship for people and companies. Clearly this is not a great starting point for banks that are trying to digitally transform their operations and services. But why is this, and what does it tell us about how to prepare for a Digital Transformation?
White Paper
Micro-Service Architectures: Objectives, Benefits & Challenges

Micro-service architectures allow systems to be broken down into independent services. They differ from service-oriented architectures (SOAs), which have been around for about a decade for several reasons:

  • They emerge from the search for practical agility and increased efficiency by precursors of Cloud Computing, such as Netflix, Amazon, Gilt or Airbnb.
  • They are naturally adapted to the Cloud and unfold natively on Platforms as a Service (PaaS). This is the type of platforms on which they have historically developed and deployed, and they naturally exploit the benefits.
  • They do not depend on a software publisher solution, such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and minimize software integration needs (EAI) with sophisticated functionality (mediation, service orchestration, etc.)
White Paper
Are You Doing Microservices the Right Way
Computer systems designers have for decades been arguing that a key principle of good systems design is to have modular, componentised software rather than large monolithic codes. This makes systems easier to develop and test in smaller, independent units, which in turn improves reliability and maintainability. This holds true for systems as simple as individual apps on your phone all the way up to complex cloud- or mainframe-based distributed systems.
White Paper
Software Architecture Guide

It’s no surprise that organizations are moving their business-critical systems to the cloud because of its availability, speed, and ease-of-use. But how does this effect and organizations ability to properly test and maintain the reliability, security, and performance of those systems?

In this Guide you'll get an insight on:

  • Today’s Software Architecture Opportunities and Challenges

  • 3 Simple Tips to Maintaining a Rock-Solid Software Architecture

  • 4 Questions to Ask About Your Software Architecture

  • Ways to automate architectural compliance

White Paper
Accelerate your Pivotal Cloud Migration Strategy

Looking to accelerate your cloud migration? Want to move to the Pivotal platform but don’t know where to start? Are you unsure how your applications will behave on PCF?

Answering “Yes” to any of those questions means that, while you are in the right place, you may not be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel but we can help! CAST Highlight provides objective metrics that will help you identify blockers and boosters to accelerate your migration to PCF.

White Paper
9 Steps To Create ADM Budgets

Demand for IT enabled capabilities is increasing and at the same time there is an expectation that IT becomes more of a strategic business partner.

Budgeting to improve the application landscape sets the tone for how technology leadership is partnering with the rest of the organization and its perceived value to the company.

In this document, we focused on helping our readers by presenting a framework on how to assess the needs for application landscape improvements. Those needs have to be assessed from the business imperatives perspective such as time to market and then tied to IT metrics.

White Paper
3 Ways To Curtail Application Maintenance Costs

Application maintenance costs can certainly add up over time, especially if you aren’t tracking how much you are spending and where that money is going. Too often, companies will spend without thinking about how much of their budgets goes towards keeping applications running smoothly.

In fact, many companies tend to believe that adding new people to the staff will bolster production and, therefore, mitigate costs. Or they believe that cutting in certain places will offset the costs of application maintenance. In some instances, these approaches can be used as smaller parts of bigger application maintenance plans, but they cannot be the only steps taken.

White Paper
3 Ways Application Portfolio Analysis Can Revolutionize Your IT Planning
One of the most difficult things IT leaders and CIOs do is plan for their IT development into the future. It is complex and changes aren’t always easy to anticipate. But what if things were just a little easier? 3 Ways Application Portfolio Analysis Can Revolutionize Your IT Planning, our free eBook download, will help you to better understand how Application Portfolio Analysis may make your job just a bit easier.
White Paper
Structural Quality An Atos Quality Approach For The Digital Age

In this white paper, Atos analyzes how an industry leading solution for application code quality and functional size measurement such as CAST impacts application health and quality aspects. We illustrate how a Tier-1 systems integrator can leverage such a tool to deliver the premium quality mandatory for the global digital revolution organizations are going through.

White Paper
7 New Things You Need To Do To Become Truly Agile

Having trouble adjusting to customer requirements? Have a short shelf-life for your software? Are your delivery schedules becoming unmanageable?

If you answered even one of these questions in the affirmative, you may need to something new to become truly agile. 7 New Things You Need To Do To Become Truly Agile, our free eBook download, can help you there.

White Paper
The 3 insights to pay down technical debt and build technical wealth

Chances are, your organization is undergoing an agile transformation to remain competitive in today’s industry. Like all journeys, there will be myriad potholes on the way, and I would like to share three insights for your agile transformation.

The following insights will help you make better decisions about where to begin your agile transformation, how to balance features and foundational coding habits, and how to increase speed and velocity.

White Paper
Digital Transformation or IT Rationalization: Why Application Cloud Migration Should Have a Balanced Strategy

The intrinsic benefits of cloud have been touted on countless occasions. The question is no longer Cloud or not Cloud, but more about how and when?

This document aims at positioning Cloud in a "dual mode“ - meaning Cloud can be a trigger AND a result. This paradigm shift is meant to describe a balanced strategy where cloud benefits are maximized and created to achieve ambitious goals.

White Paper
IT Health Check: 5 Insights
As every doctor will tell you, it’s critical to get a check-up once a year – and it’s no different with your application portfolio.  Over the year you’ve added new applications, moved resources around, and started new projects.  It’s easy to lose track of those changes if you don’t have an objective view of the costs, risks and effort hiding inside your portfolio.Companies can run an internal audit through surveys and apply a complex correlation with IT service management activities in order to associate application health with the number of defects in production.  Another option is to rely on third party advisors to execute a deep dive into part of the portfolio in order to collect findings and when applicable, set some recommendations.
White Paper
IBM "A Fact-Based Approach To Portfolio Rationalization"
As companies grow through acquisitions and mergers, the applications that support these enterprises grow. Each application brings a set of business rules, business processes and technologies, many of which raise the cost of support. As these applications become more complex, the rate of change slows as a result. In a time when enterprises must be fast and flexible, IT becomes a barrier. The need to rationalize and reduce the duplicate business functionality continues to grow.
White Paper
The 5 insights on Digital Transformation

With new trends like Internet of Things (IoT), software is everywhere. Every business - including retail, manufacturing and banking are now in the software business. They use software to unlock any advantage to streamline, increase efficiency and better engage with customers. Software is everywhere indeed, but it's still incredibly complex (and getting more complex each day).

Application Portfolio Analysis provides a fact-based assessment which is objective, repeatable and cost & time efficient to provide visibility on the products and their evolutions over time.

White Paper
Effective APA: Unlock Business-Driven Source Strategies
Sourcing managers must conduct an applications portfolio analysis as a prerequisite to formulating their applications services sourcing strategy for both internal teams and outsourcing. In this whitepaper, Gartner provides guidelines for the critical data required for an effective APA execution.
White Paper
What you don't know can hurt you: 3 insights to identify & mitigate Software Risk
This document outlines a new approach to fact-based analysis and identifies the top 3 critical insights to keep in mind when targeting software risk exposure across a set of software assets.
White Paper
The 5 Insights On CIO Onboarding
No CIO is hired to maintain the status quo or just "keep the lights on"- It's about innovation and transformation, or at minimum, it's about rationalization and consolidation. You need facts, not opinions to drive your strategic plan.Analysis provides a rapid portfolio assessment which is objective, repeatable and cost & time efficient.
This document outlines the top 5 critical insights to keep in mind when starting a new CIO position.
White Paper
Evolving Along the Cloud Continuum: 3 key insights to plan for & ease PaaS migration
The "Digital Era" is forcing us to engage with new methods to build, operate & maintain applications - faster, stronger & better. This transformation also implies an evolution to more and more intelligent applications to better engage with the customers, while creating significant market differentiators. In both cases, the Cloud has become a key enabler to embrace this digital revolution.
White Paper
The 5 Insights On Application Portfolio Rationalization & Consolidation
When companies grow, either organically or by acquisition, their IT grows with it. This tends not to be a big issue in growth mode, but it inevitably reaches a tipping point. It costs too much to support all the applications, and risk increases as resources are spread across too many projects. When deciding on which applications to keep, merge or retire, the process becomes a turf battle – influence and opinion becomes the driving factors in these decisions. By the time application quality/risk is taken into account, it’s often too late to change course.

The document outlines the top 5 critical insights to keep in mind when starting a new rationalization or consolidation initiatives.
White Paper
The Business Value Of Application Structural Quality

When application fails, the loss of revenue can be large and swift. Applications causes highly-visible outages and lapses in business every day.  Still, executives struggle to justify proactive investments in application quality. This paper presents a framework for measuring the immediate and positive revenue impact of improving application quality.

White Paper
8 Steps To Measure ADM Vendor Deliverables

Learn how Software Analysis evaluates the reliability, security, efficiency, maintainability software IT vendor deliverables. Forward-looking IT Sourcing, Contracting, Vendor Management, VMO, IT Finance professionals are leveraging software analytics to greatly improve the maturity in vendor-client relationships.  Learn how to take these 8 steps to improve sourcing governance.

White Paper
Cutting IT Costs By Applying Lean Principles

Learn how the Lean practices pioneered in the Toyota Production System apply to Application Development, DevOps, and Agile practices to delivery software. Applying Lean decreases application total cost of ownership and improves business responsiveness and operational dependability. 

White Paper
Monetize Application Technical Debt

This is a Gartner-CAST paper which shows the data-driven approach to balancing delivery agility with business risk. The paper features exclusive analysis from Andy Kyte, Gartner VP and Fellow who eloquently illustrates the systemic risk in the application portfolio caused by the accumulation of Technical Debt over the last decade.

White Paper
Paying Down The Interest On Your Applications

In this just-released white paper, Dr. Bill Curtis – SVP and Chief Scientist at CAST– examines the Technical Debt metaphor to explain how it can be used to help executives think about software quality in business terms while governing software changeability and maintainability of their application portfolios.

White Paper
7 Steps To Pay Down The Interest On Your IT Technical Debt

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.

White Paper
Build Secure Applications With Software Analysis

Learn how advanced Software Analysis and Measurement (SAM) can help improve application security by analyzing source code to identify vulnerabilities and architectural patterns in the application, and enable development teams to prevent these vulnerabilities right at the development stage with sophisticated Threat Modeling that takes into account cross-tier and cross-technology interactions.

White Paper
6 Steps To Enhance Performance Of Critical Systems

Despite heavy investment in dynamic analysis tools, organizations continue to suffer performance, scalability, and latency issues. This paper describes how automated structural quality analysis improves delivery and DevOps team’s ability to detect, diagnose, and eliminate performance and scalability issues. Read the six-step process to identify performance issues earlier.

White Paper
Modern Software Productivity Measurement:The Pragmatic Guide

This guide describes a method for adjusting productivity with quality results to gain greater visibility into the impact that quality has on the productivity of future releases. It presents best practices that can be integrated into a productivity measurement and analysis process and provide recommendations for implementing an effective measurement-driven improvement program.

White Paper
The Business Case For Software Analysis And Measurement

This practical vendor management guide helps IT sourcing executives in establishing an ADM vendor performance management program. The best practices and tools in here are based on real world experiences of practitioner.

White Paper
How To - Vendor Relationship Via Software Quality

This practical guide helps IT sourcing executives in establishing an ADM vendor performance management program. The best practices and tools are based on real world experiences of practitioners. Forward-looking IT Sourcing, Contracting, Vendor Management, VMO, IT Finance professionals are leveraging software analytics to greatly improve the maturity in vendor-client relationships.  

White Paper
Drive Business Excellence With Outcome-Based IT Contracts

This paper presents frameworks for measuring outcome-based IT contracting relationships. Clearly defining deliverables is a worthwhile effort, and provides a linchpin for a truly viable outcome-based contracts.   Paper is relevant to IT Sourcing, Contracting, Vendor Management, VMO, IT Finance professionals looking to improve transparency and governance of IT outsourcing or offshoring.

White Paper
does-your-code-smell

What You Will Learn:

  •  7 examples of code smell
  •  How to smell your code
  •  The importance of smelling your code
  • ...And Much More!
White Paper
M&A Technical Due Diligence

The 5 Insights You Should Consider In Order To Secure Your Bid And Facilitate A Seamless Post-Merger Transition.

White Paper

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