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.
www.castsoftware.com
North America 373 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Phone:+1 212-871-8330
Questions?
Email us at contact@castsoftware.com
Copyright © 2013 CAST All Rights Reserved
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.
Questions?

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

Questions?
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:
castfed@castsoftware.com
CAST prior performance in Federal contracts includes:

CAST Federal Solutions

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