NEW YORK, Aug. 1, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is nearing completion on the first phase of a "software development factory" it is building on the CAST (Paris:CAS) platform. The final vision is to run Application Development (AD) as a business to tackle the agency's growing complexity.
By being more systematic, the FDA hopes to hasten its response to changes, while increasing resource utilization and product quality. A fundamental first step to build the software factory is a global set of objective parameters and metrics put in place to monitor AD work across all FDA teams, including suppliers. To create a process for AD measurement and control, the FDA invested in the CAST Application Intelligence Platform. The CAST platform is a leader in a new market segment called AD Performance Management -- software solutions that automate AD team performance and application quality monitoring, establish an applications metrics baseline, and help control maintenance costs.
"With this initiative, the FDA has taken the lead in the government sector to quantify the productivity of all its development teams," says Ray Russo, Director of Business Enterprise Solutions, Office of the CIO. "We are baselining our application portfolio so that we can be objective and systematic with our in-house developers and outsourcers through an automated quality process, and code reviews."
Normally, simple code inspection is a manual process that is time-consuming, error-prone, and often too resource-intensive to complete. The FDA is the first federal entity to automate code review and inner structure analysis at the enterprise level. By increasing quality levels in the early cycles of application development, the FDA expects to achieve significant reduction in defects that would invariably turn into expensive patches. According to Russo, the FDA can now monitor quality and productivity of the development teams working on twenty applications in six of the eight distributed Centers. Adherence to coding best practices can be assessed and issues fixed within tight acceptance windows. Management gets real-time access to quality and performance KPI's via the CAST Dashboard.
The FDA passes the benefits of rigorous measurement on to key suppliers rather than use the new process to penalize them. The agency helps suppliers eliminate redundant work, free up maintenance cycles for new development, and thus, enhances customer satisfaction: a win-win equation for the FDA and its partners.
"The FDA success story holds valuable lessons for other federal agencies that are plagued with complexity and lack the manual resources to assess application quality and the performance of their multi-sourced AD organizations," says Vincent Delaroche, CEO and Chairman of CAST.
About FDA
The FDA is responsible for protecting the public health by assuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, medical devices, our nation's food supply, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation. The FDA is also responsible for advancing the public health by helping to speed innovations that make medicines and foods more effective, safer, and more affordable; and helping the public get the accurate, science-based information they need to use medicines and foods to improve their health.
About CAST
CAST is the world leader and pioneer in Application Development Performance Management software, providing the metrics and information IT executives must have to measure, monitor and improve the quality of business applications and the performance of development teams around the globe. Founded in 1990, CAST has helped more than 600 organizations worldwide speed delivery to the business, mitigate risks in production, improve the customer experience, and reduce the total cost of application ownership. CAST is listed on Compartment C-Eurolist by Euronext Paris (Euronext: CAS) and serves Global 2000 organizations worldwide with a network of 11 fully staffed offices in the U.S. and Europe. For more information visit www.castsoftware.com .