Along with productivity, Quality is basic in the application’s construction.
Nowadays, the tools to help IT Managers manage their application portfolio are more important than ever. Making a mistake means, most of the time, spending more, and when talking about software applications … the costs are enormous.
Now more than ever, our managers have to get it right, they can not afford to make decisions based on subjective and partial information, they need a wide vision and complex cradle of real data.
The objective is to develop optimisation tools for Quality and Productivity Management during the application’s construction that would also help IT executives with the application portfolio management
We are talking about solutions that, on one hand, certify the Software Technical Quality and, on the other hand, measure the Development Teams Productivity. If these solutions had also managed the Application Portfolio, the suite would have been almost perfect.
Just a few months ago, this was almost impossible, but now we have the right tools to manage the quality and productivity of the application’s or solution’s construction. These tools provide all the key metrics of each application (cost, effort, activity, quality, maintainability, efficiency…) and, additionally, they allow managers to analyse and compare the different applications. This way the decision making is easier and the cost reduction is guaranteed, as well as the risk control and the outsourcing agreement management.
These solutions cover a wide technological range, since they can analyse the code of all types of applications from modern (developed on Java/J2EE or .NET) to package based (like SAP ABAP IV) or legacy applications (that use languages like Cobol, Natural or JCL). That is why these solutions are so important when adapting and certifying the several IT processes such us CMMi, Six Sigma, ITIL, ISO, CobIT, etc.
These suites also allow IT executives to verify that, beyond the functional loads notebook fulfilment, the software provided has a strong internal structure, is easily maintainable and has been constructed according to pre-established conformity rules (market and corporate standards).
In the foreseeable context of IT budget reductions, these products (for quality management and productivity improvement in the application’s construction) are key elements in the implementation of a quality and direct costs control policy, as a indirect cost reduction.
Direct costs reduction
On the one hand, the implementation of premature bug detection and quality control policy in the development phase (DevKing Module) would improve, by an average 15%, the productivity of the internal team development. Another cost reduction is that these suites allow closer control of the relationship between outsourced application developers, as well as the validation of the SLAs (Service Level Agreement) related to the quality of the code provided. This practice also results in an immediate application maintenance cost reduction.
The indirect cost reduction is achieved via an effective CMMi audit compliance. The systematic introduction of the CMMi standard in the software development sector responds to a greater efficiency trend in this mature market, and to a need of accredited suppliers on quality control processes and criteria that could deliver software according to the client’s specifications. ChecKing is a tool specially designed to facilitate the implementation of CMMi standard, as well as ISO, SOX, and Basilea II.
This point is key for software houses that need to demonstrate that they work according to the market standards.