Research Library

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.

What You Will Learn:

•  7 examples of code smell
•  How to smell your code
•  The importance of smelling your code
• ...And Much More!

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

This Microsoft-CAST joint paper, put together based on the learning from numerous successful PaaS migration experiences attempts to answer questions around:

What are the top challenges and pitfalls when migrating to PaaS?
What are the keys to avoid these pitfalls?
How to conduct your migration the “leaders and doers” way?

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.

Turn Security & License Risks into Innovation

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

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

What You Will Learn:

•  7 examples of code smell
•  How to smell your code
•  The importance of smelling your code
• ...And Much More!

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