CRIF shared its experience with coding best practices in a webinar organized by CAST Italia.
CAST is the tool that CRIF Global Technologies, the CRIF competence center and IT division responsible for technology, uses to monitor code quality and measure the size of the applications. The software quality standards recommended by CAST are based on industry best practices and analysis of software quality metrics across multiple industries. CAST's metrics and insights are derived from a structural analysis of the application's source code and its underlying architecture.
Elisa Fioravanti, Senior QA Analyst, shared the strategies, best practices, successes, and future objectives regarding the utilization of CAST Software Intelligence for measuring code and structural quality at CRIF. “The data extracted from CAST – shared Elisa - is utilized to enhance code quality, maintainability, and productivity.”
Elisa explained that CRIF selected CAST as the official tool to evaluate the quality of the code in 2007. Being the CRIF portfolio huge, with more than one million function points, CRIF Global Technologies needs to have an industrialized approach to code quality to control its technical debt.
In order to measure the quality of the software released to the customer, quality scans are performed from the beginning of the application development to the release in production and subsequent adaptive maintenance phase, to ensure that bad coding practices can be identified and addressed on time.
The industrialized and standardized approach to code quality monitoring and control, thanks to the effort of all development teams, allowed CRIF Global Technologies to reach the organizational code quality threshold target in the last year. Furthermore, all recently developed applications are already exceeding that target.
This was also an occasion to explain how monitoring metrics is an essential part of the software development process. Several KPIs, like productivity, maintainability and defectiveness are calculated using data extracted from CAST and other tools. Not only are these metrics monitored and controlled at project level, they are also analyzed at portfolio and global level to assess deviations from expected quality targets and to analyze the impact of new processes, methodologies and technologies on code quality and maintainability.
Recording is available here. The webinar is in Italian.
