CAST (company)

CAST's Headquarters in Meudon, near Paris

CAST is a multinational technology corporation, with headquarters in France, near Paris, and New York City. CAST markets software quality and size (Automated Function Points counting) measurement technology and expertise, and offers software, hosting and consulting services all in support software Analysis and Measurement. The company was founded in 1990 in Paris, France, by Vincent Delaroche.

CAST pioneered the use of code quality metrics in application development SLAs, for which Gartner recently highlighted CAST as an innovative software publisher for its work in Application Services.^[1] CAST research and experts are often consulted in development quality and security by medias such as Los Angeles Times,^[2] BBC,^[3] CNBC,^[4] The Wall Street Journal,^[5] and The Economist.^[6] Research CAST's head of product development, Olivier Bonsignour, co-wrote The Economics of Software Quality^[7] with Capers Jones, another specialist in software engineering.

CAST leadership team includes Dr Bill Curtis, notable for having led the CMM at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in the early 1990s and more recently the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ), which was established by industry to implement software quality and size standards.

History

CAST was founded in 1990 in Paris by Vincent Delaroche. In 1996 CAST shipped its first software product, a “smart” IDE for building database SQL stored procedures, able to give meaningful programming advice. In 2001, the company introduced software quality measurement into its analysis products. The Application Intelligence Platform, its current flagship product, was first launched in 2004.

In 2012, CAST announced support for the Object Management Group (OMG) Automated Function Point (AFP) Standard,^[8] an effective way to measure application development productivity.

Research

CAST’s Research Labs subsidiary has developed a large repository of industry data, and issues a biennial report called CAST Research on Application Software Health (CRASH) that has garnered some industry attention. CRASH data has been cited and published in various articles in IEEE Software, among other publications. CAST Research Labs has also been active in analyzing the phenomenon of Technical Debt, co-hosting a research forum on this topic with University of Maryland’s Department of Information Systems.^[9][10]

Since its inception CAST has focused on analyzing applications instead of technology layers and as a consequence most of the research had been conducted in the domain of inter- and intra-technology dependency analysis. Several of its technology innovation projects have led to market recognition. Among them the project which leads to the detection of security problems at the architectural level in response to the need acknowledged by Hoglung, G and McGraw, G in Exploiting Software.^[11] CAST was recognized by Oseo in 2009 and awarded the "Innovative Company" label.^[12] This recognition was renewed in 2012 through another project aiming at identifying the possible resource leaks that can contribute to application performance decrease or application crashes, at the application level across the layers and without requiring the actual execution of the application as is usually the case in dynamic program analysis.

References