Every year, Senator Tom Coburn compiles the Wastebook – A Guide to Some of the Most Wasteful and Low Priority Government Spending of 2011. According to Senator Coburn in the report: “This report details 100 of the countless unnecessary, duplicative or just plain stupid projects spread throughout the federal government and paid for with your tax dollars this year that highlight the out-of-control and shortsighted spending excesses in Washington.” The list of $7B in wasteful projects is as amusing as it is disturbing. As a taxpayer, reading a list of this ilk makes our leaders and decision-makers seem detached, self-serving and simply incompetent. Political motivations aside, Coburn’s act of holding … Read More
Category Archives: Industry News
A Crash Course on CAST’s New CRASH Report
Last week, CAST issued a report on the summary findings of its second annual CAST Report on Application Software Health (aka CRASH), which delves into the structural quality of business application software. The report has earned significant coverage throughout the technology media, including InformationWeek, InfoWorld and Computerworld, as well as the Wall Street Journal. What resonates with the press seems to be two issues. First is the issue of technical debt. With financial debt being such a hot-button issue around the globe, the idea that companies are spending millions to fix errors in application software that should have been fixed during pre-deployment phases of production highlights that business must fundamentally … Read More
Curtis Gives Keynote on Technical Debt at Construx
The Construx Software Executive Summit, which opens today in Seattle, WA, provides a forum for top executives to compare, evaluate and improve their Software Development experiences and strategies at the enterprise level. Keynoting this year’s summit will be CAST’s chief scientist, Dr. Bill Curtis, who will present on the topic, “How Governing Code Quality Reduces Business Cost and Risk.” Curtis’ keynote will focus on how addressing structural quality of application software during pre-production mitigates, and in many cases eliminates, the risk of software malfunctions and outages after deployment, which also significantly reduces a company’s technical debt. He will explain how companies can work with legacy systems to achieve optimal structural … Read More
CAST-ing Quality on HCL’s Assessment Services
CAST announced today an agreement with HCL Technologies, a leading global IT services company, that will augment the outsourcing company’s ASEESS-SMART software assessment services with CAST’s Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) capabilities of automated analysis and measurement. Of the agreement, Rajiv Sodhi, Sr. Corporate Vice President and Chief Customer Officer for Consumer Services, Manufacturing, Public Services, Enterprise Transformation and Strategic Sourcing for HCL Technologies, said, “As applications increasingly become core to the business transformation and operations of an enterprise, it has become important to embed greater degrees of predictability and performance assurance into the system. HCL is at the forefront of the next wave of establishing these quality standards of the … Read More
London Bourse is Falling Down – Time to Analyze Its Structure?
This morning’s news was rife with accounts of the London Stock Exchange Group being forced to halt trading on its main market due to a technical fault in its barely two-week-old MilleniumIT trading system. This is yet another example of the need for pre-deployment analysis of structural quality. An average mission critical application has just under 400,000 lines of code, 5,000 components, 1000 database tables and just under 1000 stored procedures. Architecturally, these components are layered such that an average transaction passes through about five layers between the user and the data. The applications that are in the top quartile of size and complexity comprise over 2.5 million lines of … Read More
Trends From the Gartner Vendor Summit 2010
I’ve been surfing the booths at the Gartner Outsourcing & Vendor Management Summit in sunny, gorgeous Orlando (check out some pictures on Twitter). To mark the event, CAST is giving away an iPad. To enter the drawing, take our sourcing survey. Application Sourcing Survey for Sourcing Clients Application Sourcing Survey for Sourcing Vendors So what’s new? Nothing radical. But there seems to be a gradual evolution. The themes remain the same with a few twists. Here’s a quick summary of the trends I’ve noticed. 1) A couple of years ago, every vendor was pushing their business process management services (BPO and BPM) to ensure that they were moving up the … Read More
Forrester’s Bill Martorelli On Multisourcing
Forrester analyst Bill Martorelli spoke last week on the topic of Multisourcing in 2010: Best Practices for Managing Risk and Cost. 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. … Read More