Manage Architecture and Technical Debt at Agile Speed

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.

Agile quality techniques such as Test Driven Development and Unit

Testing are typically driven from the functional requirements. Short,

time-boxed iterations limit the time available for evaluating complex

interactions among components in different layers of the architecture

and for ensuring that the non-functional requirements for security,

reliability, maintainability, and performance have been met. Even more

challenging, non-functional, structural flaws are notoriously difficult

to detect with test cases. Since these application-level defects are

typically investigated during acceptance testing at the end of an

iteration or sprint, problems are detected when it is often too late to

make corrections before release. Consequently, these flaws become

technical debt to be remediated in future 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

• Adhere to the application’s architectural rules

• Have structural problems that create technical debt

CAST AIP is a powerful application-level static analysis technology

that detects violations of architectural and coding practice standards,

as well as the difficult-to-test interactions across a multi-layer,

multi-language application. CAST AIP integrates into a continuous

integration environment to analyze the source code base, and parses

the entire application regardless of language searching for patterns

in the source code metadata that represent non-functional flaws.

It can also provide automatic documentation of the architecture

implemented in the source code.

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CAST for Agile Development

• Non-functional Quality It can be difficult

to detect quality problems through test cases,

so CAST moves feedback forward during an

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.

• Technical 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 CAST’s

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

function points computed as closely as

possible to the specification of the International

Function Point User Group. In contrast to

manual counting, CAST’s function point counts

are consistent and updated automatically with

each execution of the technology, which can

provide additional calibration for effort

estimating and productivity analyses,

supplementing data available from such

sources as burn-down charts.

www.castsoftware.com

Europe 3 rue Marcel Allégot 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

Questions?

Email us at contact@castsoftware.com

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