Managing Risk, Avoiding Disruption

Posted By Jonathan Bloom on June 6, 2011 | CAST News, Software Demystified

I’ve written quite a bit about the spate of businesses that have suffered some form of disruption over the last few months – security breaches at Sony, Android malware attacks, system outages at the London Stock Exchange, operational system failures on London’s East Coast Line and numerous others. All these cases have had one thing in common: they all have had software structural issues as their root causes.

One recurring question arises from these failures, “How does a company avoid the structural flaws that lead to business interruption?”

CAST, in conjunction with Gartner, has released a white paper that discusses the importance of mitigating risk in software and avoiding the failures that plague businesses. The paper, titled, “Software Risk Management: A Primer for IT Executives,” makes the case that structural quality is the key to reducing the risk of business disruption.

Modern Goals, Modern Problems

Gartner Research Director Thomas Murphy, whose research is included in the white paper, notes that software quality is often a poor misnomer for the current practice of risk management applied by most companies. When it comes to practices and scheduling in software projects, the focus is not to drive quality but to mitigate delivery risk. However, as organizations seek to drive down maintenance costs and adapt to the shorter project life cycles found in agile practices, it’s equally or more important to focus on reducing the risk of business disruption.

As the CAST white paper shows, structural quality is essential for managing the root drivers of IT costs and business risks in mission-critical applications. Unlike the quality of the process by which software is built, enhanced and maintained, functional, non-functional and structural quality have to do with the software product itself – the asset that generates business value.

Accurately analyzing and measuring the quality of an application (which typically has a large number of components interconnected in complicated ways, and connections with databases, middleware and APIs) is monstrously complex. It can only be accomplished with an automated system that analyzes the inner structure of all components and evaluates their interactions in the context of the entire application.

More about the importance of focusing on structural quality and reducing business disruption risk is available in the Gartner-CAST white paper. An executive summary of the white paper is also available.

Tags: Application Quality, automated analysis and measurement, CAST, Gartner, Project Management, software analysis, software measurement, Software Quality, Software Quality Metrics, structural quality