CAST for Vendor Monitoring and Control

Intelligent Management
of Outsourced ADM Vendors
Losing touch with your outsourced
applications
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 ap-
plication performance in production, without
any insight into the quality of the product
itself, i.e., the software. So what is the result
of relying upon inadequate SLAs to manage
even the most well-intentioned outsourcing
vendors?
After a few months into outsourcing, IT
organizations gradually lose visibility over the
quality of the applications being developed,
and the applications themselves.
With systems becoming increasingly com-
plex, the situation can easily lead to:
• missed deadlines or delayed project deliv-
erables
• unsatisfactory deliveries
• less responsive service to the business
• heightened security and stability risk
• resource lock-in
• increased maintenance costs
This is especially apparent when outsourc-
ing vendors may not rigorously follow the
development and architectural guidelines key
to the organization. This lack of coordination
escalates live testing and change request
costs. Mainly, it translates into greater risk
and less predictability.
Automated code review for
greater visibility
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
CAST AIP.
Outsourcing governance with metrics
and guidelines
Your outsourcer is now in charge so how can
you ensure you are still proactively managing
your outcomes? Experience has shown that
major performance and scalability prob-
lems are often caused by poorly developed
“With CAST software,
you can analyze the
work delivered, optimize
costs and improve future
delivery,”
CIO, Global Financial Services Company
Achieve transparency over your application development and maintenance
supply chain
continues

architecture or poor coding practices among
developers. Such errors can be uncovered
by analyzing the source code early in the
development cycle.
With CAST, you can automatically monitor
compliance with development best practices
and architectural guidelines. IT managers can
easily measure applications against a set of
quality rules pertaining to architecture, docu-
mentation, performance, database access,
best programming practice and more while
looking at the trends across teams, or the
same teams over time.
The enforcement and correct use of existing
development frameworks, naming conven-
tions and programming best practices all
result in applications that are much easier to
maintain and more easily understood by new
team members.
Supply chain transparency leads to
better product and reduced risk
Our colleagues in manufacturing have learnt
a long time ago that in order to master the
supply chain it is essential to measure quality
all along the way. Measured, managed and
optimized supply chains are symptomatic of
industries with mature processes.
CAST offers the only analogous measure-
ment approach for the software delivery
industry. By using CAST to measure Techni-
cal Quality throughout their supply chains, IT
leaders are minimizing and eliminating risks
of problems such as data corruption, system
interruption, unpredictable behavior, and poor
application security.
Proactive management of quality means that
quality is built into the end product delivered to
the business, rather than “tested in.” It means
avoiding unpleasant surprises identified while
testing at the end of the development chain or,
worse, while operating your business.
Improve predictability of
change requests
What do you know about the complexity of
your outsourced applications and what it will
cost you to modify them? Are you confident
that your outsourcer can make these esti-
mates without your support?
With CAST software, you can analyze the
work delivered, optimize costs and improve
future delivery by automatically monitoring
the complexity and maintainability of your
applications—across all tiers and with drill-
down capabilities—to best understand the
output being provided.
CAST can provide estimated costs and ef-
fort by comparing versions of an application
over time (or benchmarking) broken down by
levels of complexity and offer insight on how
resource intensive a future change should be.
The more complex an object, the more time
and effort it will take to modify and test it.
Avoid resource lock-in
To fully reap the benefits of outsourced de-
velopment in a global sourcing environment,
CAST helps you and your vendor to move
fast to save costs and reduce risks. CAST
products ease the transfer of an applica-
tion from one team, or individual, to another,
helping new personnel to easily find their way
within a large amount of source code.
With CAST, you always have access the
technical Knowledge Base (repository of all
the metadata collected). This provides real-
time documentation, in case you eventually
plan to bring the application back in-house
or safely transfer it to another link in your
software supply chain.
www.castsoftware.com
Europe 3 rue Marcel Allégot 92190 Meudon - France Phone: +33 1 46 90 21 00
North America 373 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Phone:+1 212-871-8330
Questions?
Email us at info@castsoftware.com
Copyright © 01/2011 CAST All Rights Reserved
Immediate and enduring ROI
Use factual information to manage
outsourcing relationship
• De-risk the sourcing negotiation with
transparent effort estimation
• Get a handle on change request
costs with objective measurement
of outcomes
Proactively manage quality of out-
sourced applications
• Reduce risk of problems experi-
enced by the business
• Shorten “time-to-acceptance”
Increase agility and responsiveness
to end-user needs
• Work with vendor to optimize
maintainability, to ensure ongoing
responsiveness
• Manage the transferability of soft-
ware, guarding against lock-in to
specific resources

CAST for Vendor Monitoring and Control

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to CAST for Vendor Monitoring and Control

Similar to CAST for Vendor Monitoring and Control (20)

More from CAST

More from CAST (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

CAST for Vendor Monitoring and Control