Sometimes it is Rocket Science

Posted By Jonathan Bloom on February 23, 2011 | Software Quality

Very often when describing a concept, technique or any way of doing something, you hear people quip, “It’s not rocket science.” While normally this holds true for static analysis of business applications, the difference between the capabilities of the type of automated analysis and measurement offered by CAST versus manual structural analysis can make the former seem like rocket science.

So it was with a touch of irony that we announced this week that CAST has acquired the core technology of a new product line from a sole source service provider to the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS)…in other words, we’ve acquired “rocket science.”

The product CAST acquired is deeply specialized in embedded software for aerospace applications and gives us a robust, lightweight, software-analysis engine. This Cloud-based technology can provide feedback on thousands of lines of code within seconds for a fast health check based on industry norms and software engineering standards. And developers will be pleased to know they won’t have to upload their source codes into the cloud to do the analysis, which will not only improve the speed of the analysis, but also provides them with significant peace of mind around security.

As an added bonus to the acquisition, our team also will get a big boost of experience as the senior half of the original development team behind the product now joins CAST. They represent 80 man-years of world-class software engineering expertise.

In the coming weeks, CAST will unveil more details about its plans for this software. Stay tuned to this blog for more information.

Tags: Add new tag, CAST, cloud computing, function points, quality, quality assurance, rocket science, Software Development, software metrics, software performance testing, Software Quality, structural quality