Making technical debt visible … Making technical debt visible already proves to be quite a challenge, as it’s all about exposing the underwater part of the iceberg. But how deep underwater does it go? To know for sure, you would need the right diving equipment. To go just below the surface, you would start with a snorkel. But to go far down, you need a deep-sea exploration submersible.
Category Archives: Technical Debt
Reduce Software Risk through Improved Quality Measures with CAST, TCS and OMG
Webinar Summary I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion with Bill Martorelli, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research Inc; Dr. Richard Mark Soley, Chairman and CEO of Object Management Group (OMG); Siva Ganesan, VP & Global Head of Assurance Services at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS); and Lev Lesokhin, EVP, Strategy & Market Development at CAST. We focused on industry trends, and specifically discussed how standardizing quality measures can have a big impact on reducing software risk. This interactive format allowed attendees to hear four distinct perspectives on the challenges and progress that is being made within organizations directly, and also at systems integrators. Mr. Martorelli started the discussion by … Read More
Is Every Part of the Application equal when Assessing the Risk Level?
Risk detection is about identifying any threat that can negatively and severely impact the behavior of applications in operations, as well as the application maintenance and development activity. Then, risk assessment is about conveying the result of the detection through easy-to-grasp pieces of information. Part of this activity is about highlighting what it is you’re seeing while summarizing a plethora of information. But as soon as we utter the word “summarizing,” we risk losing some important context. Application split impact as a strength in risk assessment An application can be considered as a whole in its purpose of servicing one area of the business, yet it is composed of multiple … Read More
Surviving the IT Perfect Storm
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
Empowering Developers with System-Level SAM Tools
The analogy between brick-and-mortar building architecture and software architecture is used quite often. Although they are quite different, this still helps to remind us that in software engineering everything is interdependent with a crucial cause-effect factor, which is actually thousands of times more sensitive than in hardware construction. It is fairly obvious that the quality of a building is a combination of the quality of the bricks, the quality of the assembly of the bricks in the wall, and the quality of the assembly of the walls (along with the electricity, plumbing, etc.). So it follows that assessing the quality of an application does require more than assessing the quality … Read More
Don’t Blame the Outsourcer
In my travels, I run into a lot of organizations that are not happy with the performance of their outsourcer. In many cases, the core relationship is the result of a cascade effect. The organization delivered an application that had poor structural quality to begin with, and left the outsourcer with the difficult task of meeting their SLA requirements with a faulty application. If you want great results from an outsourcer, here’s job one: make sure the application you’re delivering is structurally sound to begin with. Step two: make sure the tools and technologies you use to ensure structural integrity are also part of the outsourcing agreement and, in the … Read More
Moving your application to the cloud: Getting ready!
When we start talking about cloud, several common questions come to mind: What do you mean by “cloud”? What standard requirements need to be fulfilled before moving to the cloud? Is my data secure on the cloud? What about application quality? Is it easy to push my application on the cloud? I will be examining these questions and their answers in a series of posts around cloud. The original goal for the cloud was to reduce the cost of IT infrastructure by allowing customers to utilize an infrastructure managed by a third party that contains physical and virtual machines, disk space for storage, and other resources remotely. This type of … Read More