Application Assessment Services Factory
Helping Clients Understand the True Value of Application Assets
Getting the Most Out of Existing
Application Assets
Too often, IT organizations don’t have a clear
understanding of their current application
portfolio. They may know what applications
exist and for the most part what they do—or
• A regulatory compliance liability
• A potential security risk
To manage code quality risk your clients need
to have a thorough understanding of the
internal quality of their critical applications.
understand how they do it. Years of work
Automated Solution,
Powered by CAST
have gone into the applications that run
Assessing the health, internal quality, com-
our organizations today, based on multiple
plexity, maintainability and functional size
technologies and languages, built upon the
of an application can be a daunting manual
intelligence of people who are most likely no
task that takes time and expert resources.
longer part of the team. Because of this, your
Application Assessment Services provide a
clients need to analyze existing applications
huge, instant return on investment (ROI) by
and systems within the portfolio, understand
automatically conducting detailed application
what is in place, the dependencies across
health checks.
at least were intended to do—but they don’t
applications and effectively build a plan on
how to maintain key applications, mitigate
risks as well as easily adapt to future development standards. All of this must be done
while ensuring that the changes made to the
applications do not make them less capable
of evolving in the future.
The CAST Application Intelligence Platform
provides automated application assessments
and profiling using multi-parameter metrics
and indicators—broken down by quality
& quantity categories—so that your client
knows what the development team is truly
delivering and how well they are doing it.
The Value of Better Code Quality
Using an automated assessment service is
Time, business and cost pressures have all
and analyzing the source code manually.
pushed developers to make sub-optimal
CAST’s analysis software reads code at the
choices that impact the quality and future
rate of 2,500,000 lines per hour, analyzing
performance of critical applications. The risk
and understanding every single detail of
is great—over time poor code quality results
applications across layers, technologies and
in applications that are:
languages. How many lines of code can your
• Incredibly difficult to change
teams analyze per hour with total accuracy?
obviously far more efficient than just sampling
• Very costly to maintain
• Impossible to move from one team to
another
Questions? Email us at contact@castsoftware.com
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Figure 2 Example of a drilldown to the metrics used to measure an application’s ability
Figure 1 CAST AD Governance Dashboard sample view
to change
Closer to the Applications
Our application assessment services are designed to deliver the detailed information your
clients need to measure, monitor and control
one or more of their applications, displayed
in an executive Web-based portal - CAST
Application Development (AD) Governance
Dashboard. The CAST Application Intel-
The following is a list of application health
factors measured by CAST AIP:
• Transferability
• Changeability
• Robustness
• Performance
• Security
• Maintainability
ligence Platform, relying on advanced source
Each key indicator is built bottom-up from the
code analysis technology, is designed to
data extracted from the source code. When
expose areas of concern, including areas of
multiple applications are analyzed at once,
high complexity, high risk and lack of adher-
the CAST Application Intelligence Platform
ence to architectural, coding, documentation
can compare indicators between applica-
and security standards.
tions, providing benchmarking capabilities to
Our executive report is designed specifically
for Application Development executives. It
helps answer questions such as:
• How big and complex is this system?
• Which modules are really complex?
• How do these two overlapping systems
compare in terms of maintainability?
quickly isolate issues and guide the detailed
analysis as you drill down into the details to
alleviate the issues that may exist.
A Flexible Offering
Using CAST AIP, you can provide your clients
a range of innovative assessment services.
• Should we keep investing in maintenance or Two distinct types of assessments are
proposed below, depending on your client’s
redesign this application?
• Is this application a good candidate for
outsourcing?
• What is the risk that this application will
have performance issues in the near future?
Questions? Email us at contact@castsoftware.com
specific application profile:
Through a complete health assessment
service, your client will gain access to a full
inventory of their chosen business-critical ap-
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plication or application set, broken down by
tion capabilities on areas of primary complex-
six health factor quality ratings—transferabil-
ity, together with data layer access. With this,
ity, changeability, robustness, performance,
you’ll get complete visibility into the applica-
security and maintainability—with remediation tion’s structure and inter-dependencies with
suggestions for areas of concern. We will also
other applications within the portfolio. Finally
deliver to you complete electronic techni-
you’ll have at your fingertips the possibility
cal documentation of the application source
to benchmark all application assets such as
code with the ability to query the inventory.
systems, applications, applications’ versions,
Finally you’ll be able to identify at-risk appli-
modules, workgroups, people and more for
cations based on their adherence (or non-ad-
better transparency over the performance of
herence) to architectural and industry coding
your client’s AD organization and confidence
best practices as well as their compliance to
on the work being delivered.
your top 20 self-defined rules.
Through a dedicated legacy application as-
Your consultants will be able to thoroughly
sessment service, you will gain access to a
analyze various objective parameters pro-
full inventory of your client’s chosen legacy
duced by the CAST Application Intelligence
application or legacy application set. You will
Platform and assess the “health” – inventory,
be able to provide an expert maintainability
complexity, maintainability and quality—of
analysis, giving your clients invaluable insight on
your application, giving you the fact-based in- their application maintainability (as defined by
formation you need to decide what to do next
SEI) and recommendations on possible areas of
and provide expert advice on possible reme-
improvement. You will also be able to check the
diation options. You will also be in a better
code’s compliance to industry rules and best
position to more effectively mitigate risks for
practices as well as your top 20 custom rules.
your client by profiling their applications and
Since CAST collects application’s information
by zooming in on the actual objects, modules
based on a “DNA”-level analysis you will also
or programs that are at the root of the issues
be given the choice to drill down and provide
flagged within the dashboard report.
technical documentation as needed to your
With our graphical eBlueprints, you’ll benefit
client’s team.
from advanced drill-down and visualizaFigure 3 eBlueprint sample view
How to Get Started
CAST proposes a special partnership
limited only to investing in an Application
Assessment Services Factory (AASF) to its
Systems Integrator (SI) partners, whereby:
1) CAST’s main objective is market access;
the SI’s main objective should be high margin services on the AASF, which can lead to
important services upsell opportunities.
2) T
he SI and CAST agree on a clear definition of an application: A functional coherent set of code which is compilable.
3) T
he special AASF pricing can only be
used once on a given application and
can be applied by the SI on its existing
Application Management contracts, or
for its customers and prospects.
Questions? Email us at contact@castsoftware.com
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4) Special pricing available for application
assessments only delivered by the AASF.
5) Co-technical profiling of ideal targets
is required on top of the needed consulting to help the SI set-up the factory and
train its Assessment Officers.
for application assessment powered by
The CAST license for each application
CAST is required.
assessment is a limited term license of 2
6) CAST & SI to define & execute a Goto-Market plan, with milestones and
quantifiable objectives, of the services to
be delivered by the AASF (co-marketing,
brochures, sales and technical training,
target account definition).
7) A minimum upfront investment of one
months valid only for one complete analysis
of the targeted application.The CAST
unique pricing based on the above conditions will be a flat rate per pack of application assessments (capped by the size of the
highly complex category). Please see your
account executive for further details.
pack of 10 AA (Application Assessments)
Table 1 Determine the size of your applications.
) Applications which do not fall under one of the types listed are considered as Out of Standard
2) J2EE or .NET applications can also contain XML, CSS, BAT, and HTML, but this doesn’t affect the classification
3) Applications built with more than 10% of Perl, PHP, Shell scripts and others languages not directly supported by CAST are out of
the scope of the above grid as they need an initial study
About CAST
CAST is a pioneer and world leader in Software Analysis and Measurement, with unique technology resulting from more than $100 million in R&D investment. CAST introduces fact-based
transparency into application development and sourcing to transform it into a management
discipline. More than 250 companies across all industry sectors and geographies rely on CAST
to prevent business disruption while reducing hard IT costs. CAST is an integral part of software
delivery and maintenance at the world’s leading IT service providers such as IBM and Capgemini. Founded in 1990, CAST is listed on NYSE-Euronext (Euronext: CAS) and serves IT intensive
enterprises worldwide with a network of offices in North America, Europe and India. For more
information, visit www.castsoftware.com.
Questions?
www.castsoftware.com
Email us at contact@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
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