Last week, Capgemini released its second Financial Services World Quality Report. The report cited that while corporations across the globe continue to be constrained by budget issues, the complexity and volume of application software they handle continues to increase exponentially. As a result, Quality Assurance organizations are turning more and more to the cloud and outsourcing as strategies to achieve quality applications, while attaining optimal business value.
When it comes to outsourcing in particular, the report states, “With a more comprehensive outsourcing strategy, firms can derive value from transforming business processes, improving time to market, capturing operational efficiencies and further optimizing costs.”
As firms continue to increase their outsourcing efforts in search of business value, they should also be looking to increase the quality of the products produced by those outsourcers. Moreover, the IT services companies taking on outsourcing projects should be taking steps to assure the structural quality of the products they produce for their clients.
Quality is Job 1
The impetus to achieve greater structural quality was undoubtedly at the core of a recent decision by Mahindra Satyam, a leading global consulting and IT services provider, which this week announced the launch of Structural 
Testing Analysis & Measurement of Projects (STAMP). With nearly 30% of production defects due to structural quality, STAMP will help its clients’ application owners identify structural issues before they reach production, and will provide insight for implementing corrections before application software is deployed, thereby reducing overall cost of correction.
At the heart of the unique spotlight into the unexplored structural quality of the most business critical applications is CAST’s platform of automated analysis and measurement. CAST’s platform powers STAMP by analyzing structural quality of the application stack, which enables Mahindra Satyam to deliver higher performance, greater reliability and increased security, while also reducing underlying technical debt.
In its recent announcement of his company’s partnership with CAST, GS Raju, global head-testing services for Mahindra Satyam notes that having the ability to weed out issues of structural quality during pre-production is a market differentiator for his company. He says, “We see great opportunities in upscaling the value to our existing clients and prospects and elevating existing niche testing services by rolling out STAMP.”