Manage Architecture and

Technical Debt at Agile Speed

Control Architectural Quality and Evolution
Detect Non-Functional Problems Early
Measure and Manage Technical Debt
Challenge
When working with Agile, you need to control architecture, satisfy non-
functional requirements, and reduce technical debt in short iterations.
Solution
The CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) can be
incorporated into a continuous integration environment to evaluate
if newly integrated components:
Violate rules of good architectural and coding practice affecting
security, robustness, changeability, performance efficiency, and
maintainability
Create unintended side effects in other layers of the application

Agile quality techniques such as Test Driven Development and Unit Adhere to the applications architectural rules
Testing are typically driven from the functional requirements. Short, Have structural problems that create technical debt
time-boxed iterations limit the time available for evaluating complex
CAST AIP is a powerful application-level static analysis technology
interactions among components in different layers of the architecture
that detects violations of architectural and coding practice standards,
and for ensuring that the non-functional requirements for security,
as well as the difficult-to-test interactions across a multi-layer,
reliability, maintainability, and performance have been met. Even more
multi-language application. CAST AIP integrates into a continuous
challenging, non-functional, structural flaws are notoriously difficult
integration environment to analyze the source code base, and parses
to detect with test cases. Since these application-level defects are
the entire application regardless of language searching for patterns
typically investigated during acceptance testing at the end of an
in the source code metadata that represent non-functional flaws.
iteration or sprint, problems are detected when it is often too late to
It can also provide automatic documentation of the architecture
make corrections before release. Consequently, these flaws become
implemented in the source code.
technical debt to be remediated in future iterations.

continues >
CAST for Agile Development function points computed as closely as each execution of the technology, which can
possible to the specification of the International provide additional calibration for effort
Non-functional Quality It can be difficult Function Point User Group. In contrast to estimating and productivity analyses,
to detect quality problems through test cases, manual counting, CASTs function point counts supplementing data available from such
so CAST moves feedback forward during an are consistent and updated automatically with sources as burn-down charts.
iteration or sprint. Since the development team
does not have to wait until acceptance testing
to identify problems in the code that can cause
outages, security breaches, performance
degradation, or data corruption, they are able
to identify and prioritize corrections much
earlier. Therefore, the most severe problems
do not get relegated to future sprints as
technical debt.

T
 echnical Debt By identifying the
violations of good architectural and
coding that constitute technical debt,
CAST provides a vehicle for measuring the
debt accumulating in an application. CAST
helps distinguish between benign problems
and the most severe violations that must
be remediated to avoid excessive cost
to IT and risk to the business customer.
CAST provides the information needed
to help development teams prioritize
refactoring decisions.

Management Governance With CASTs

management-level summary of the non-
functional health of applications, executives
can track the quality characteristics of their
application portfolio. At a glance, they can
gain insight into resource allocation needs by
identifying the applications at greatest risk
for cost and operational problems. They can
also track the architecture and non-functional
quality of their applications across releases
to identify trends in quality characteristics
that create future costs or risks.

Sizing CAST provides up-to-date size

measures of the code base, not only by lines
of code, but also the functional size of the
application represented as automated

Questions? www.castsoftware.com
Email us at contact@castsoftware.com Europe 3 rue Marcel Allgot 92190 Meudon - France Phone: +33 1 46 90 21 00
North America 373 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Phone:+1 212-871-8330

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