the business value of application internal quality - web version
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White Paper
April 2009 A CH IE VE I NS IGH T . D E L I V ER E XCE
The Business Value
of Application Internal Quality
An Executives Guide to Immediate
Business Impact
When a mission-critical application ails, the loss o
business revenue is large and swit. Poor application
quality causes highly-visible major outages; it also
causes ongoing lapses in business perormance that
are less visible, but steadily add up to substantial revenue
loss. Even minor quality improvements can result in
signifcant business gain. Yet, executives struggle
to build a business case to justiy proactive investments
in application quality. This paper presents a quantitative
ramework or measuring the immediate and positiverevenue impact o improving application quality.
Dr. Bill Curtis
Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist, CAST
Co-author CMM, People CMM, & Business Process Mat
Model, Fellow o the Institute o Electrical and Electronic
Engineers, authority on IT Sotware Quality
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Executive SummaryDr. Bill Curtis, SVP and Chie Scientist at CAST, presents a powerul
quantitative ramework or estimating and measuring how improvements in
application quality boost business benets and reduce IT costs.
The Problem
Whilemostbusinessescanquantifythecostsoftheirapplicationfailures,th
struggletobuildbusinesscasestojustifyproactiveinvestmentsinapplicati
qualitytopreventthesefailures.
Rarelyareproduction-environmentfailuresduetobotchedfunctional
requirementsalltooftentheyarecausedbynon-functionaldefectsdefe
thatresultfrompoordesignandcodingthatliehiddenuntiltheyareruthl
exposedduringbusinessoperations.
Poorapplicationqualitycreatesseveraldangerousproblemsthatputcurre
andfuturebusinessrevenueatriskoutagesincriticalbusinesssystems,corrupteddata,securitybreaches,andregulatorynon-compliance.These
problemsusuallyescapedetectionduringtesting.
Theresult:DeathbyaThousandCuts.Businessperformanceproblemsdu
topoorapplicationinternalqualitysubstantiallydecreasebusinessvaluea
increaseITcoststhroughoutanapplicationsusefullife.
The Solution
Throughextensiveresearchandreal-worldexperienceinserving650+
enterprisesworldwide,CASThasidentiedvekeyareasofinternalsoftw
qualitythatmostaffectbusinessoutcomestheCASTApplicationHealth
Factors.
ImprovingtheseApplicationHealthFactorshasadirectimpactonincreas
businessproductivity,acceleratingspeedtomarket,improvingcustomer
experience,anddecreasingITcosts.Itsawin-winsituation:substantial
businessbenetatlowerITcost.
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Contents
I. Why Is the Internal Quality
o a Business Application
Important?
II. How Do You Measure the
Internal Quality o a Business
Application?
III. How Health Factors Aect
Business Value
IV. Reducing Risks to the Business
V. Maximizing Customer
Experience
VI. Increasing Business Agility
VII. Improving Business
Productivity
VIII. Increasing ITs ContributionIX. An Example o Business Loss
Due to Poor Internal Quality
X. The Value or Improving the
Internal Quality o Applications
I. Why Is the Internal Quality of a Business Application Important?
As companies conduct more o their critical business activities online, conce
over the quality o IT applications has moved rom the IT department to the
boardroom. Downtime on a retail e-business Website can be measured in lost
sales. Compromised customer records can be measured in customer deectio
Corrupted nancial data can be measured in restatement costs. All three can
measured in lines o bad press.
The types o application problems that most requently cause these disasters
not deects in unctional logic what the application is supposed to do. Rat
they are caused by the non-unctional deects that result rom poor design an
coding how the application does it. Most unctional deects are detected
during development through reviews and testing. The non-unctional deects
oten lie hidden beneath the surace o an application until they are triggered
during ordinary business operations and cause embarrassing calamities. As
Diomidis Spinellis points out in his recent book, Code Quality, a ailure to
satisy a non-unctional requirement can be critical, even catastrophicnon-
unctional requirements are sometimes dicult to veriy. We cannot write a tcase to veriy a systems reliability.
While most businesses can quantiy the costs o their application ailures, th
struggle to build business cases necessary to justiy proactive investments in
application quality that prevent these embarrassments. This paper presents
a ramework or estimating and measuring how improvements in application
quality relate to business value. Projecting the actual business benets an
organization will achieve by improving the internal quality o an application
requires a detailed knowledge o the business it serves
II. How Do You Measure the Internal Quality of a Business Application?
The internal quality o an application describes among other attributes the
soundness o its architectural design and the extent to which its implementat
ollows proven coding best practices. Internal quality is not measured by pas
test cases that were mostly designed to veriy the unctional correctness o an
application. Rather, measures o internal quality assess the non-unctional
attributes o the application the internal structure and engineering of its cod
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Through extensive research and industrial experience CAST has identied
areas o internal sotware quality that most aect business outcomes. These
areas, or health actors, are similar but not identical to the high level sotwa
quality measures dened in ISO 9126. Each o these ve areas can be assess
by measuring numerous attributes o the sotware, and then aggregating the
results into a summary health actor or that area (see Table 1). These health
actors summarize internal sotware quality at a level that can be related to
business outcomes and value. These health actors and some o the business
benets they aect are summarized in Table 1.
CAST has identifed fve key areas
o internal sotware quality that
most aect business outcomes.
Table 1 - Application Health Factors and Their Benefts to the Business
Health Factor Description Example business benefts
Transerability Attributes that allow new teams or members to
quickly understand and work with an application
Reduces inefciency in transferring application work between
teams
Reduces learning curves
Reduces lock-in to suppliers
Changeability Attributes that make an application easier and
quicker to modify
Improves business agility in responding to markets or customers
Reduces cost of ownership by reducing modication effort
Robustness Attributes that affect the stability of the
application and the likelihood of introducing
defects when modifying it
Improves availability of the business function or service
Reduces risk of loss due to operational malfunction
Reduces cost of application ownership by reducing rework
Perormance Attributes that affect the performance of an
application
Reduces risk of losing customers from poor service or response
Improves productivity of those who use the application
Increases speed of making decisions and providing information
Improves ability to scale application to support business growth
Security Attributes that affect an applications ability to
prevent unauthorized intrusions
Improves protection of competitive information-based assets
Reduces risk of loss in customer condence or nancial damages Improves compliance with security-related standards and
mandates
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III. How Health Factors Affect Business Value
There are ve primary business objectives against which the costs o an
applications poor internal quality can be assessed. These business objective
include:
Reducingriskstothebusiness
Increasingbusinessagility
ImprovingbusinessproductivityOptimizingITscontributiontotheBusiness
Improvingcustomerexperience
The internal quality o business applications is critical or achieving importa
IT outcomes. These IT outcomes in turn aect a large number o business
outcomes that are critical or achieving business objectives. This chain o val
creation rom application health actors to business objectives is depicted in
the right to let fow o relationships in Figure 1. These relationships do not
represent a one-to-one mapping since health actors and IT objectives interac
myriad ways with business outcomes and objectives.
Figure 1. Relationships between health actors and business objectives
The internal quality o business
applications is critical or achieving
important IT outcomes, which in
turn are critical or achieving key
business objectives.
Maximize business availability
Minimize degraded service
Minimize lost revenue
Minimize liquidated damages
Minimize customer costs
Minimize data reconstruction
Minimize unwanted breaches
Maximize information protection
Maximize customer confidence
Maximize customer retention
Maximize standards compliance
Accelerate market responsesIncrease customer timeliness
Support mass customization
Support business growth
Accelerate new functionality
Accelerate information retrieval
Increase new functionality
Increase resource availability
Reduce cost of ownership
Reduce operational costs
Reduce vendor lock-in
Reduce existing defects
Reduce new defects
Improve stability
Ensure architectural integrity
Reduce security vulnerablities
Ensure coding rule compliance
Improve performance
Reduce code complexity
Maximize scalability
Reduce modification effort
Reduce rework
Improve code readability
Reduce learning curves
Ease team handoffs
Minimizebuziness
risks
BusinessObjectives
BusinessOutcomes
ITObjectives
HealthFactors
Increasebusiness
agility
Improvebusiness
productivity
OptimizeIT's
contribution
Robustness
Security
Performance
Changeability
Transferability
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Each business objective may be composed rom a set o more specic objecti
against which the value o application quality can be assessed. For instance,
business risks come in several types:
outagesincriticalbusinesssystems,
corrupteddata,
violatedsecurity,and
regulatorynoncompliance.
Each o these more specic business objectives may have a unique set o
business outcomes that aect it. IT outcomes will dier on which specic
business outcomes they most aect. Figure 2 displays this more detailed
analysis o how health actors aect o the our specic business objectives
underlying the objective o reducing business risks.
Although we could represent these relationships with greater sophistication
using systems dynamics, this diagram is adequate to show that the internal
quality o an application has direct and wide-ranging impact on business
outcomes and the achievement o business objectives. Even without building
a quantitative model o the relationships in this diagram, it is possible to use
simple equations that express how application quality aects the business va
derived rom an application.
We dont need sophisticated
models to show the connection
between application quality
and business objectives. Simple
equations will do.
BusinessObjectives
BusinessOutcomes
ITObjectives
HealthFactors
Minimizebuzinessrisks
Robustness
Security
Performance
Changeability
System
outages
Corrupteddata
Violatedsecurity
Non-compliance
Maximize business availability
Minimize degraded service
Minimize lost revenue
Minimize liquidated damagesMinimize customer costs
Minimize data reconstruction
Minimize unwanted breaches
Maximize information protection
Maximize customer confidence
Maximize customer retention
Maximize standards compliance
Reduce existing defects
Reduce new defects
Improve stability
Ensure architectural integrity
Reduce security vulnerablities
Ensure coding rule compliance
Improve performance
Maximize scalability
Figure 2. Relationships between Health Factors and Specifc Business Risk Objectives
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The cost o internal quality
problems can be expressed as
the loss o known current or uture
revenue, the cost o underutilized
workers, liquidated damages, andother costs based on historical
business data.
The next sections will present equations that demonstrate how these
relationships can be used to express the business value o the internal quality
applications. These equations are not presented as ormal ROI analyses, sinc
we do not include the cost o money, investment recovery periods, and other
components o ormal ROI models. Rather they represent loss unctions attac
to each business objective that indicate how poor internal quality is translate
into lost revenue and increased costs.
IV. Reducing Risks to the Business
Business risks oten present the easiest case or quantiying quality benets.
cost o quality problems can be expressed as the loss o known current or utu
revenue, the cost o underutilized workers, liquidated damages, and other cos
based on historical business data. Dierent types o risks experience dieren
types o losses.
Outages that terminate business transactions Consider a simpliedevaluation o the loss due to an outage in a commercial application such as a
reservation or customer order system. The costs involve lost revenue, eort o
the business to recover and reactivate transactions, spikes in help desk and
related costs or managing customer interactions, liquidated damages, and ot
costs that may be unique to the specic area o business. Although not all co
may be triggered in each outage, they should be considered to ensure they do
remain hidden in ongoing business activities.
Loss =((avg.revenueperminute)x(numberofminutesunavilable))+
costtoreactivatebusiness+
((Additionalcustomerserviceminutes)x($perminute)+
futurerevenuelostfromdefectingcustomers+
liquidateddamagesifapplicable+
otherrelatedcosts)
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Although expensive, the identifable
costs o security breaches are oten
less than the lost revenue rom
customers who either no longer
use the application or who deectto competitors they perceive to be
more secure.
Corrupted data The costs associated with corrupted data include recreatin
accurate data, redeveloping or correcting inaccurate outputs and reports, and
any liabilities resulting rom the use or reporting o inaccurate data. The cost
o data corruption is compounded by the length o time beore the inaccurate
data is detected, since in many cases this makes the cleanup more extensive.
The business bears many o the costs o data corruption either through having
correct the data or or unproductive downtime while IT restores accurate data
Loss =costofdatareconstruction+
costofrecreatingaccuratereports+
liabilitiescreatedfrominaccuratedata+
otherrelatedcosts
Violated security Deects in an applications architecture or code oten
create vulnerabilities that hackers and cyber-criminals exploit to penetrate
the system. These costs can include those related to thet o business or
customer inormation, repairing malicious damage, inorming customers o
possible compromised inormation, security improvements to systems and
business processes, liquidated damages, and lost uture revenue rom deecti
customers. Although expensive, the identiable costs o these breaches are
oten less than the lost revenue rom customers who either no longer use the
application or who deect to competitors they perceive to be more secure.
Loss =costofstolenresources+
costofrectifyingdata,records,oraccounts+
costofinformingcustomers+
costofsecurityimprovements+
futurerevenuelostfromdefectingcustomers+
liquidateddamagesifapplicable
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The more conusing the interace,
the more customer support
personnel must be available to
assist customers in completing
transactions. Usability andresponsiveness contribute
to revenue growth and lower
customer interaction costs.
Regulatory noncompliance Weaknesses in an applications code can place
enterprise in non-compliance with industry standards or government regulati
While noncompliance can result in nancial penalties, violations o regulatio
such as Sarbanes-Oxley can have criminal implications.
Loss =costofpenaltiesfornoncompliance+
costofbringingthesystemintocompliance
V. Maximizing Customer Experience
As more customer transactions move online, business applications increasing
become the ace o the business. The customers experience with the compan
becomes their experience with the applications usability and perormance.
Conusing user interaces, labyrinthine Websites, and glacially slow system
responses rustrate customers. At a minimum, these problems reduce the amo
o business a customer may transact, and in the worst case they drive custom
to competitors.
To compound the customer loyalty problem, conused customers create even
more costs per transaction. When customers have diculty using a company
automated business systems, they call customer support to conduct transactio
that could have been perormed online. The more conusing the interace, the
more customer support personnel must be available to assist customers in
completing transactions. For instance, when system response is slow, custom
oten begin pushing buttons that may be interpreted as commands to pages th
have yet to display. Many o these incorrect entries require sta time to undo
return to the original state in a customers account. Usability and responsiven
contribute to revenue growth and lower customer interaction costs.
Loss =futurerevenuelostfromdepartingcustomers+
futurerevenuelostfromreducedtransactionswithloyalcustomers
costofconductingtransactionsshiftedfromonlinetocustomerserv
costofcustomerservicecallsrelatedtoonlinedifculties
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The more needlessly complex
the architecture or coding o an
application, the longer it takes to
add or modiy unctionality, veriy
its correctness, and deliver it intooperation. Improving agility and
reducing business risk produce
immediate business benefts.
VI. Increasing Business Agility
Modern communication technology (cellular grids, the Internet, etc.) has
multiplied the pace o business. Consequently, competition has shrunk the
time available or responding to customer demands and market conditions. T
agility o a business in responding quickly is strictly limited by the internal
quality o its applications. The more needlessly complex the architecture or
coding o an application, the longer it takes to add or modiy unctionality, ve
its correctness, and deliver it into operation. Worse, unnecessary complexityinduces more mistakes and rework lengthening the time to develop and trans
new unctionality into operation.
Loss =revenuelostfrommissingthecustomersbuyingwindow+
revenuelosttofastermovingcompetitors+
futurerevenuelostfromdefectingcustomers+
diminishedprotfromdilutionofrstmoveradvantage+
diminishedeconomyofscalefromlossofmarketshare
The value o internal sotware quality to business agility is in terms o lost
opportunity cost. It represents the lost revenue or market share experienced
when competitors can respond quicker or when the response misses the
customers buying window. The importance o business agility cannot be
overstated or long term business viability and growth. Both improving agility
and reducing business risk produce immediate business benets. However,
improvements in business agility also aect a companys ability to execute it
business strategy and optimize long term results.
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Outages aect more than business
revenue. They drain IT sta
productivity and morale.
VII. Improving Business Productivity
Since a primary purpose o many applications is to improve business
productivity, deects which cause outages or perormance degradation rob the
organization o the ull benet rom its investment in both the application and
the workorce using it. Business losses caused by outages were covered as
business risks. The productivity impact on employees and revenue generatio
will be treated separately here. The costs o lost productivity are usually
calculated in terms o additional personhours to complete work or o lostopportunity or revenue generation. Even i the additional hours were perorm
as unpaid overtime, there is an impact on sta morale that can urther reduce
productivity or induce voluntary turnover. In addition, reduced productivity c
inject delays into the completion o tasks that have other costs such as penalt
or late delivery.
Loss =[(1(reducedoutputunderdegradedperformance
avg.outputatnormalperformance))
xnumberofworkersaffected
x
avg.hourlycostxhoursofdegradedperformance]+
[(1(reducedoutputorrevenueunderdegradedperformance
avg.outputorrevenueatnormalperformance))
xperformance
xavg.revenueperhour]+
costsofdelayedwork
VIII. Increasing ITs Contribution
For most large enterprises, IT is unded as a xed percent o the corporatebudget, typically rom 4% to 4.5%. Since IT is a xed percent in the budget,
cost savings in IT usually translate into reed resources available or addition
work, rather than as a return o unds to the business. The value proposition
then becomes, How can we get more business unctionality or our xed
investment?
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Studies have proven that 50%
o maintenance work is devoted
to trying to understand the code
rather than adding unctionality.
Reductions in code complexity canreduce this understanding time
so that more time can be spent
developing valuable unctionality.
Usually around hal o ITs budget is spent on application development
and maintenance. The internal quality o business applications controls a
surprisingly large proportion o these costs and dictates how much o applica
development resource will be allocated. For instance, every hour spent in
rework xing quality problems is a lost opportunity to provide additional valu
to the business. Similarly, studies have proven that 50% o maintenance work
is devoted to trying to understand the code rather than adding unctionality.
Reductions in code complexity can reduce this understanding time so that m
time can be spent developing valuable unctionality.
Loss =((proportionofannualeffortspentonrework)
x(avg.burdenedcostofadeveloper)x(numberofdevelopers))+
(((Proportionannualeffortspentmodifyingorenhancingexisting
code)x(.5proportionofmaintenancespentunderstanding))
x(avg.burdenedcostofadeveloper)x(numberofdevelopers))
IX. An Example of Business Loss Due to Poor Internal Quality
Using the ormula or application outages that terminate business transaction
consider the business costs o a 1-hour outage or an application that yields
$120 in revenue per minute ($7200 per hour). In addition to lost revenue, the
business will spend $1000 in employee time to veriy, correct, or regenerate
partially completed transactions and to veriy the system is working correctly
when brought back online. The help desk experienced a surge o 250 additio
minutes o customer service calls at $2 per minute. Business intelligence
analyses discovered that 20 existing customers made no urther contact with
the company ater the outage, with annual revenues rom those customers bei
$150 per year. Fortunately this application did not involve any liquidateddamages. This total cost o this outage is estimated to be:
Loss =((60minutes)x($120perminute))+$1000reactivationcost+
$500customerservicecosts+$3000lostcustomerrevenuethisyear
Loss =$11,700
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A 10% decline in application
perormance can quickly add up
to almost hal a million dollars o
business productivity loss in a
quarter.
I the company experienced a 1 hour outage with this application once per
quarter, the total annual loss to the business just rom outages would be $46,
not including IT costs or repairing the cause o ailure, retesting the applicat
and similar IT costs. These IT costs will be treated as rework in a subsequent
analysis since they reduce ITs ability to contribute to the business.
Next consider that in addition to outages this applications perormance
degrades by 10% due to poor database access procedures that reduce its abilto handle an increasing load o business transactions. Also consider that this
application supports 100 knowledge workers whose ully burdened cost is $2
per hour. This loss o productivity is calculated both as lost revenue and as lo
in the productive value o knowledge worker compensation. The cost o this
applications internal quality problems per quarter is estimated to be:
Loss =((0.1output)x(100workers)x($25perhour)
x(500hoursperquarter))*
((0.1output)x($7200revenueperhour)x(500hoursperquarter))
Loss = $485,000perquarter
This number may be reduced by voluntary unpaid overtime to get work
completed. Nevertheless, poor internal quality is still robbing the organizatio
o a substantial portion on its expected return rom the investment in this
application and its workorce.
Finally consider the cost o enhancing and maintaining this application.
Consider there are 5 developers assigned ull time to this application with an
annual ully burdened cost o $100,000 each. Approximately 35% o their tim
is spent xing deects, while 50% is spent maintaining and enhancing existin
code. The estimated lost contribution rom investment in IT by the business i
Loss =((.35proportionofrework)x($100,000burdenedrate)
x(5developers))+
(((.5annualeffortspentonmodication)x(.5proportionof
maintenancespentunderstanding))x($100,000burdenedrate)
x(5developers))
Loss =$300,000
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When the value o sotware
quality is computed only against
development or maintenance
costs, the ull impact o the loss
remains invisible to the business.However, when computed against
business costs and lost business
opportunities, a strong business
case can be made or investing in
quality.
The loss rom the risk o outages, lost business productivity, and the lost
contribution rom IT attributed to poor quality, is surprisingly large. Based
on the sizes o these losses, improvements in the quality o applications oer
substantial benets to the business. When the value o sotware quality is
computed only against development or maintenance costs ully contained wit
IT, the ull impact o loss due to poor quality remains invisible to the busines
However, when computed against business costs and lost opportunities, it is
much easier to make a strong case or investing in quality.
X. The Value for Improving the Internal Quality of Applications
Improving the quality o applications has two components; external, unctional
quality and internal, non-unctional quality. Most deect detection and related
quality activities built into standard application development and maintenance
processes ocus on external or unctional quality. These are the deects that repre
deviations rom the specied requirements or the application. Advances in testin
peer review, and requirements management processes and technology have impr
the ability o application development teams to detect and remove the majority o
these deects beore placing the application into operation.
Since internal, non-unctional quality problems are harder to detect, hidden as th
are in the architecture and engineering o the application, they are requently the
causes o outages, degraded perormance, security breaches, corrupted data, and
similar problems. These quality problems come in a wide range o maniestations
rom bad coding techniques, to needlessly complex designs, to violations o codin
standards. By detecting these internal quality problems and correcting those with
most critical priorities, application developers can dramatically increase the valuan application to the business.
Returning to our example application in the last section, correcting a non-unctio
deect that would cause a 1-hour outage will save the business $11,700 per outag
more i the outage were to last longer than an hour. Now consider the productivity
impact o removing internal quality problems that reduce the degraded perorma
rom 10% o its original capacity down to only 7% o original capacity. The impac
would save the business $145,500 per quarter rom the original loss o $485,000
(gure 3).
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Loss =((0.07output)x(100workers)x($25perhour)
x(500hoursperquarter))+
((0.07output)x($7200revenueperhour)x(500hoursperquarter)
Loss =$339,500perquarter
Figure 3. Example reduction in quarterly lost productivity rom improving applica tion perormance
There are two ways that improvements in internal quality can aect the
contribution o IT to the business. I improvements in the internal quality o t
application were to reduce the proportion o annual eort absorbed in rework
to 25%, then the team could contribute $50,000 more eort to producing new
unctionality or the business. Similarly, i improvements to the internal qual
o the application reduced its complexity and developers spent only 40% o t
modication/enhancement time understanding the code, they could contribut
$25,000 more eort to producing new unctionality or the business. As show
below, the amount o lost contribution to the business has been reduced to$225,000 with improvements to internal quality reeing $75,000 o eort to
contribute more value to the business.
Loss =((.25proportionofrework)x($100,000burdenedrate)
x(5developers))+
(((.5annualeffortspentonmodication)x.4proportionof
maintenancespentunderstanding)x($100,000burdenedrate)
x(5developers))
Loss =$225,000
When internal quality improvements
reduce rework by 25% a year and
enable maintenance sta to spend
60% less time making sense o the
code, it rees up $75,000 o eortper application or creating new
business unctionality.
Before remediation After remediation$0
$100,000
$200,000
$300,000
$400,000
$500,000
$600,000
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By proactively detecting internal
quality problems and correcting
them, IT teams can dramatically
increase the business value o an
application.
Figure 4. Example reduced quarterly loss in IT contribution to the business ater improving internal application qu
Compared to the licensing, installation, learning, and usage costs o automate
tools or identiying internal quality problems, the ROI or internal quality
improvements is substantial. Amounts will dier by the size and related
attributes o the application, but or business-critical applications the value t
the business o improvements is dramatic and long-lasting. IT organizations
must crat these types o analyses to deend their investments in improving th
internal quality o applications.
Before remediation After remediation$0
$50,000
$100,000
$150,000
$200,000
$250,000
$300,000
$350,000
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www.castsoftware.com
CAST Headquarters
North America: +1 212-871-8330
Europe: +33 1 46 90 21 00
About CAST
CASTs unique technology is the result omore than $70 million in R&D investment.Top engineering talent, dedicated to buildingthe best technology or assessing the internalquality o mission-critical applications,has made CAST the leader in Automated
Application Intelligence. CASTs mission is toenable the worlds best enterprises to achievesignifcantly more business productivity romtheir complex IT sotware systems.
Founded in 1990, CAST has helped more than650 organizations worldwide speed IT deliveryto the business, mitigate risks in production,improve customer experience, and reducethe total cost o application ownership.CAST is listed on NYSE-Euronext (Euronext:CAS) and serves Global 2000 organizationsworldwide with a global network o locationsin the US and Europe.
Bill Curtis is an industry luminary who is responsible orinfuencing CASTs scientic and strategic direction, as well
as helping CAST educate the IT market on the importance o
managing and measuring the internal quality o its sotware.
He is best known or leading the development o the Capability
Maturity Model (CMM) which has become the global standard or
evaluating the capability o sotware development organizations.
Prior to joining CAST, Dr. Curtis was a Co-Founder o TeraQuest,
the global leader in CMM-based services, which was acquired
by Borland. Prior to TeraQuest, he directed the Sotware
Process Program at the Sotware Engineering Institute (SEI)
at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to the SEI he directed
research on intelligent user interace technology and the sotware
design process at MCC, the th generation computer research
consortium in Austin, Texas. Beore MCC he developed a sotware
productivity and quality measurement system or ITT, managed
research on sotware practices and metrics at GE Space Division,
and taught statistics at the University o Washington.
Dr. Curtis holds a Ph.D. rom Texas Christian University, an M.A.
rom the University o Texas, and a B.A. rom Eckerd College. Hewas recently elected a Fellow o the Institute o Electrical and
Electronics Engineers or his contributions to sotware process
improvement and measurement.
Dr. Bill Curtis
Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist