On Quality

On August 4^th, 2010 CAST hosted an IT executive luncheon, bringing together leading Atlanta-area companies. Leading the discussion was The Coca-Cola Company, elaborating on how they measure quality and the velocity of change in their code base and use these metrics to deliver faster, at higher quality and lower cost.

Atlanta Luncheon

Here are the key themes that emerged from the luncheon:

1. Objective measurement of the software product itself is absolutely essential.
2. Objective measurement drives visibility — essential for early detection of structural quality problems that become prohibitively expensive to fix later.
3. Early detection of structural quality lapses shifts IT from a reactive to a proactive stance, improving it both internally and in the eyes of business partners.
4. When you measure the right structural quality metrics, you take control over the drivers of software cost and business risk.
5. Starting to measure quality is easier than you think and pays off faster than you think. Even companies without the resources of Coca-Cola can take small steps that significantly improve their ability to manage cost and risk.

Want to hear more? For a list of some more of our upcoming luncheons and events click here!

Forrester analyst Bill Martorelli spoke last week on the topic of Multisourcing in 2010: Best Practices for Managing Risk and Cost.

Bill Martorelli, Principal Analyst, Forrester

You can hear the presentation again by clicking here.

Bill presented the 10 commandments of multisourcing covering governance, SLAs, and best practices. Here are some salient points from his presentation.

• Be realistic.  You want vendor innovation and low cost and high quality. You can achieve all that, but it takes governance discipline and a focus on the right metrics.
• The core of governance is having transparency and visibility into the product delivered by vendors. Get to the right metrics to understand the true drivers of cost and business disruption risk.
• Measure and monitor these drivers to get predictive control over cost and risk.
• Beware of reducing cost without improving quality.

What are the right  KPIs to monitor? Which governance steps are essential? How should your multi-vendor SLA be structured?

To find out, click here.

Industry data demonstrate that code reviews are highly effective.

Out-Sized Effectiveness of Code Reviews

The problem, however, is that code reviews are time consuming, expensive, and difficult to get right.

To be effective, code reviews require the following:

1) Software engineering expertise

2) An objective basis for evaluating code

3) Comprehensive code coverage

4) A repeatable method that produces reliable results

5) Practical guidance on how to prioritize and fix problems found, and

6) A way to quantify improvement (and hence the effectiveness of code review activities)

As you can see, these are very difficult to set up in any organization. It quickly becomes too expensive, cumbersome, and unworkable.

So how do you get both low cost AND effective code reviews that overcome all the usual stumbling blocks (1 -6) that otherwise prevent companies from effective code reviews?

Check out the webinar on automating code reviews on the DCG website!

C.K. Chesterton wrote, “The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his mother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

“It’s the qualifier ‘necessarily’ that shows Chesterton possessed a truly philosophical mind”, write Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, in their book Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar (p.81).

Yes indeed.

There’s something so neat-o about making distinctions. Good distinctions don’t simply classify — they illuminate and clarify.

Lev at the Forrester Office in Dallas

I was reminded of that during a recent visit to Dallas to spend some time with Forrester analyst Mary Gerush. (That’s my colleague Lev Lesokhin, breaking into an off-the-charts-spinal-tap-volume-11 smile because he’s finally out of the Dallas heat and inside the cool Forrester digs.)

Let’s distinguish three kinds of business risk :

• Delivery Derailment Risk – risks that add IT cost or stop business revenue due to delayed launch or cancellation.
• Business Case Risk — risks that affect the quality of a delivered application; even though the application works, it doesn’t work as well as it should.  The number of successful transactions per unit time cannot be completed to fulfill the benefits articulated in the business case.
• Business Opportunity Risk — risks that make the application hard to maintain and change in the face of pressing business demand. The resulting loss of agility damages future business revenue.

You lie awake at night worrying about project derailment risk and pay scant attention to the other two.

Watch out!

Software quality is getting hard to measure and automated quality measurement is the only way to go.  That’s the news from our IBM Innovate2010 quality survey. Complete survey results are on Slideshare.

Business Disruption: Hard to Root Cause, Hard to Avoid

“We’re not surprised that so few respondents believe their companies are able to analyze their software properly because assessing the health, internal quality, complexity, maintainability and functional size of an application can be a daunting manual task that is costly, time consuming and grossly inefficient,” said Bill Curtis, Chief Scientist at CAST.

Measuring Software Quality is Getting Harder

Dr. Curtis added, “Automation facilitates this assessment and provides an instant return on investment by helping fix distressed projects and improving core business application assets.”

The survey respondents couldn’t  agree more.

Automation is Essential for Measuring Software Quality

Get the complete survey results on Slideshare.

And our iPad (64G) winner is…(drum roll)…

Drawing the lucky iPad winner

Carol Poulsen,  Senior Vice President, Group Architecture, Innovation and Solution Delivery Services, Royal Bank of Canada. Thanks for participating Carol!

And thanks to all who participated in our IBM Innovate2010 Quality Survey.

Results of that survey in the next post…

For the third year in a row, CAST is pleased to be featured as a key IBM business partner at IBM Innovate 2010. Come visit us in pedestal “L” in the partner pavilion to see Rational and CAST AIP in action!

We have demos and high-powered engineering talent at your disposal.

Take a survey and enter a drawing to win an iPad!

Drawing closes this Friday, June 11 at 5PM Eastern Daylight Savings Time.

Good luck!

I heard from an old friend, Shyam Nadig,  who had a question about the previous post — in particular, how the CAST for ERP solutions compare with products like SAP’s Solution Manager.

Thanks for the question Shyam. Here’s the answer.  Readers, please keep in mind that this is specifically about CAST functionality.

While there’s some overlap with SAP’s Solutions Manager, CAST’s automated analysis and measurement of the SAP environment complements SAP’s solution. Here are a handful of key points where we add distinct value.

End-to-End Coverage of the ERP Environment

1) We measure the product itself, not the process by which it is customized. Specifically, we accurately quantify the quality and size of customization and upgrades done by internal or outsourced teams.

2) Our coverage of the SAP environment goes beyond all the SAP-related technologies. These additions (like SQL calls to an Oracle RDBMS) are often critical to the performance and stability of ERP systems in the production environment.

3) Finally, and probably most importantly, the types of problems CAST detects go beyond those that can be detected in functional and non-functional testing. These are problems that have to do with the structural quality — the way in which the system is architecturally put together. The problems here can remain deeply hidden and have serious consequences. We’ve studied this carefully in a number of our customer environments and have developed a reliable way to quickly find and fix these difficult problems.

Running an ERP system? Having any of these problems?

• Erratically performing applications
• Escalating maintenance and enhancement costs
• Lack of visibility over the deliveries made by internal or outsourced teams
• Upgrade paralysis

CAST takes the entire enterprise business application into account

Getting your arms around an ERP system to find and fix the root causes of these problems is notoriously difficult. No single person, however knowledgeable, can fathom it from end to end. Automated analysis and measurement are absolutely essential.

ERP systems are highly data intensive. The efficiency, performance, and maintainability of ERP systems are tightly connected to how well database calls are handled. In a recent CAST study of over 30 SAP systems we found that more than 80% of database calls were improperly handled, resulting in erratic performance and instability.

These calls quickly outrun the ERP vendor’s proprietary language to include other languages (Java, C++,…), frameworks (J2EE, .NET, …), and relational databases (Oracle, DB2, …). This mélange of technologies aggravates performance, stability, and maintainability. Add in the deceptively high amount of customization in these systems, and things become even more complex.

In these complex environments the manual measurement of quality, too expensive and time consuming, let alone possible.

What follows refers specifically to CAST’s ERP capabilities.

CAST’s automated analysis and measurement of SAP, Siebel, and PeopleSoft addresses the growing need for consistent, objective measurement to eliminate costly customization errors of ERP systems.

Listen to the CAST for ERP Podcast.

CAST’s coverage of ERP systems is both broad and deep. This extensive coverage is a must.

So how does CAST eliminate costly ERP customization errors?

1. CAST’s automated analysis and measurement of ERP systems is based on a very detailed understanding of the architectural structure of the system – what the components are and how they’re interconnected. We build this architectural model from the ground up in intense detail.

2. CAST’s sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms are specifically tuned to measuring quality (performance, stability, and maintainability) in the ERP environment. Specifically for ERP systems, CAST has about 100 pattern matching rules each for SAP and Siebel and about 400 engineering rules specific to PeopleSoft.

3. CAST detects changes between the original core application and the customized application, or between a patched and un-patched version of the same application. Along with detailed architectural visibility and objective measures of quality hot spots, CAST gives IT organizations and system integrators a detailed, practical roadmap for sequencing their development, maintenance, and upgrade tasks.

Details? Check out our SAP , Siebel, and PeopleSoft solutions.

Quick Update — Webinar Moved to May 13.  Stay tuned!

Join me and Tony Timbol of David Consulting Group on Thursday, May 13 for a joint DCG-CAST Webinar.

Topic: Get A Win/Win At Software Politics: Learn How An Independent Application Engineering Review Can Work For You
Time: 9AM to 10AM EDT
REGISTER for the webinar

In this brief webinar, David Consulting Group (DCG) and CAST Software will show how a consensus Application Engineering Review analysis of your application portfolio (or subset) will support improved product quality and faster time to market. Get everyone talking on the same page and moving in the same direction.

This is a no cost 45-minute webinar with a 10-minute Q&A to follow.

Hope to catch you on the 13th of May!