cast federal solutions

There continues to be a major drive

for governance around the quality,

maintainability, and reliability of applications

delivered to the U.S. Federal Government,

yet all government departments and

agencies are expected to execute

their mandates with fewer budget

dollars. CAST’s U.S. Federal group

helps government agencies maximize IT

investments and optimize performance

through the use of proven technologies and

best practices.

IT Vendor Transparency

Federal IT programs are increasingly

mandating standards to application

development and sustainment vendors as

part of the acquisition process. However,

program offices often face challenges to

develop standard contracting language that

ensures software code quality checking

becomes “business as usual” for every

delivery to government. Additionally,

programs are challenged to provide

unambiguous guidance to their systems

integrator partners on the standards that will

be used to assess delivered applications.

The applied use of application, program,

or enterprise-level Software Analysis

and Measurement promotes common

understanding for government and

providers on the current and ongoing

delivery quality of the code. This visibility

improves outcomes, with a 50% lower

likelihood of testing or deployment defects

thus reducing production risks and reducing

costs for fixes, retesting, and rework.

Software Assurance

In the report Cyber Security: A Crisis of

Prioritization, the President’s Information

Technology Advisory Committee summed

up the problem of non-secure software as

follows: “Vulnerabilities in software that are

introduced by mistake or poor practices

are a serious problem today.” Applications

designed with solid architectural

fundamentals emphasizing reliability and

resiliency are more difficult to penetrate,

despite the fact that software development

is typically not managed scientifically or with

a rigorous security discipline throughout

the development and sustainment program

management lifecycle.

Poor design results in vulnerabilities that

are often replicated and propagated within

a complex system. Simply performing late-

stage security audits and building firewalls is

not enough—security must be designed and

built into an application and then rigorously

verified multiple times within each and every

release.

CAST’s Software Assurance solution

provides a holistic, system-level assessment

that verifies conformance to requirements

and industry standards.

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CAST U.S. Federal Solutions

CAST helps government agencies optimize IT vendor performance and reduce IT system risks.

Software Code Quality Checking

Software Code Quality Checking (SCQC)

is an automated analysis of source code

to ensure that the application meets the

stated performance, maintainability, and

usability requirements within program

budget, program schedule, risk, and

other constraints. SCQC complements

Developmental Test & Evaluation (DT&E)

and Operational Test & Evaluation (OT&E)

by identifying defects earlier in the system

development lifecycle (SDLC). Since

SCQC focuses on the structural, and not

functional, aspects of the application,

government testers can concentrate on the

objectives of DT&E and OT&E, as opposed

to finding defects overlooked by the

developer and having to return the product

for resolution and rework. By identifying

and correcting defects earlier, end-users

will see measurable improvements in

the performance of the application and

program executives will see a reduction in

sustainment/maintenance costs.

Program and IT Portfolio Benchmark

Benchmarking delivers critical benefits for

the enterprise or larger individual Category

1 or 2 programs looking to continuously

improve application development

governance and transparency. First,

benchmarking provides objective

current-state assessments that provide

insight into cost, quality, and cycle time,

external and internal comparison of

quality, and identification of meaningful

gaps that can be improved. Second,

effective benchmarking is a foundation

for transformation since it enables an

organization to easily identify and prioritize

opportunities—by process, vendor,

and cost driver—which, in turn, results

in relevant improvement targets and a

stronger overall business case for the

transformation effort.

Benchmarking initial quality and state of

a portfolio forms the basis for continuous

“The CRASH Report shows that Government, more than any other industry, has the most complex and most difficult

to maintain IT systems. What’s worse is that, in this highly outsourced ecosystem, the system integrators that develop

these systems do not suffer the consequence of these higher sustainment costs – the government does.”

-Dr. Bill Curtis

SCQC ensures critical systems meet performance, reliability, and security requirements within budget and other program constraints.



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improvement. Ongoing benchmarking

encourages continuous application

development improvement culture as it is

supports regular measurement against an

objective baseline.

We often hear government executives

question how they are performing relative

to similar industry or government organiza-

tions. To meet this need, CAST introduced

Appmarq, the industry’s first software qual-

ity benchmarking capability in 2010. We

gather data from CAST analyses performed

across global industry and public sector IT

organizations and provide normalized data

in support of external benchmarking.

IT Productivity Measurement

The largest opportunity for improving

quality and productivity during application

development is by eliminating the largest

source of waste: 30-50% of development

effort is devoted to rework of defects.

These staggering numbers are driven by

the fact that defects become 10 times

more expensive to fix for each major phase

of the software lifecycle they slip past.

Under these circumstances, quality largely

determines productivity.

One of the most vexing problems in

software engineering is measuring the

amount of progress made in developing

or sustaining a software product. CAST

Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) is

a platform that gives OCIO and Program

executives the visibility and control

needed to quantify quality and progress,

rather than just time spent, so they can

improve business productivity and reduce

IT costs. Productivity without quality is a

waste and, paradoxically, quality without

productivity is expensive! Superior

performance is achieved when both quality

and productivity increase simultaneously.

CAST provides penetrating insight into

application structural quality that is

critical to improve the overall cost of

ownership, business responsiveness, and

dependability of applications.



Questions?



Appmarq provides normalized industry data in support of external benchmarking.

“…a failure to satisfy a non-functional requirement can be critical, even catastrophic…non-functional require-ments are sometimes difficult to verify. We cannot write a test case to verify a system’s reliability… The ability to associate code to non-functional properties can be a pow-erful weapon in a software engineer’s arsenal.” -Diomidis Spinellis, Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective



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Federal Partnerships

CAST has successfully teamed with Boeing, CSC, Northrop Grumman, Accenture, Keane,

Ingenium, Booz Allen, Lockheed, Raytheon, and Sybase Corporation, among others.

Contract Vehicle

GSA Schedule (GS-35F-0649S)

For examples of contracts and SLA’s, please contact the CAST Federal Practice:

[email protected]

CAST prior performance in Federal contracts includes: