The economy, the complexity and pace of business, and an ongoing lack of resources have created a perfect storm for IT departments worldwide. As wave after wave of IT failures litter the press, there’s no question that the storm is here. In its wake, businesses are faltering, careers are shattering, and stockholders are left wondering “How could this happen … again?” The key to preventing your business and career from landing on the rocks is the aggressive identification and elimination of risk. This document provides some tactics designed to identify risks across vast application portfolios and eliminate risk within critical business systems. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning With … Read More
Category Archives: Software Analysis
How to Build the Best Action Plan for your Application
Applications are built on thousands, millions, maybe even tens of millions, lines of code. They are based on specific architecture gathering technologies, frameworks, and databases set up with their own specific architecture. If you have an action plan to improve your application on a specific issue, what will be your strategy? Do you select one problem related to quality or take the opportunity to refactor part of your application? You know about issues coming from end users, but how do you address those inside the structure of your application? I remember meeting with development teams and management who were trying to find the root cause of performance issues, as delays … Read More
Risk Detection and Benchmarking — Feuding Brothers?
Risk detection is the most valid justification to the Software Analysis and Measurement activity: identify any threat that can negatively and severely impact the behavior of applications in operations as well as the application maintenance and development activity. “Most valid justification” sounds great, but it’s also quite difficult to manage. Few organizations keep track of software issues that originate from the software source code and architecture so that it is difficult to define objective target requirements that could support a “zero defects” approach. Without clear requirements, it is the best way to invest one’s time and resources in the wrong place: removing too few or too much non-compliant situation in … Read More
The Tech Babel Fish for CFOs
Any advocate for better software quality knows that one of the biggest challenges is helping the CIO reach the CFO. When your team needs a budget for an important project, those conversations often break down. Thanks to the unavoidable technical complexity of IT, oftentimes the CIO might as well be speaking Esperanto to the CFO. When it comes to budgeting, IT might be the least-understood department in your organization. And what the CFO doesn’t understand, he doesn’t budget for. Instead, capital that should rightfully go towards IT growth and innovation is allocated to other groups and initiatives. That dulls the organization’s competitive edge, and can have a toxic effect on … Read More
Android Application Failures Still Try Our Souls
Happy Independence Day everybody! I only hope those of you reading this on your Android device have not turned it sideways or performed some other seemingly innocuous action that has made this application fail. I say this because I recently read yet another blog about “workarounds” to compensate for application failures inherent in Android devices. These pieces have become almost ubiquitous over the past 18 months to the point where one would think Google would just go back and perform the structural quality analysis it needs to do to address the issues. Their failure to do so reminds me on this day before Independence Day of the opening lines of … Read More
Foretelling Facebook’s IPO Failure
I’m not one who believes in fortune tellers or those who claim to be able to predict the future. Heck, I don’t even read my horoscope and cringe whenever someone attempts to force it upon me. Only when my wife has attempted to read me my horoscope have I offered even as much as a polite “hmm.” Nevertheless there are many out there who swear by those who claim to be able to predict the future, especially in the financial industry. And while there were those who predicted a rocky road for Facebook’s IPO, it is doubtful that anybody could have foreseen NASDAQ’s technical melt down that surrounded the Facebook IPO. … Read More
Done Off-Site, Done Right
In 1807, French playwright Charles-Guillaume Étienne penned the famous line, “On n’est jamais si bien servi que par soi-même.” For those who do not speak French, you may recognize this now idiomatic phrase as the oft uttered, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Étienne’s words are a proclamation of self-reliance commensurate with the attitude of the French Revolutionary period during which he earned his acclaim; however, they are quite obviously not a hard and fast rule among businesses today. In today’s world, many companies that want “something done right” – including the development of software – look overseas for other companies to do it right for them. … Read More