If you get antsy wondering about the implications of ignoring those last-minute fixes when rolling out a big application, now you have ROI ammo to justify going back in for a final polish.
If you get antsy wondering about the implications of ignoring those last-minute fixes when rolling out a big application, now you have ROI ammo to justify going back in for a final polish.
CAST, a vendor of tools used in software analysis and measurement, just released a study that concludes that the “cost to fix a conservative number of problems that remain in an application once it is operational exceeds $1 million for the average business application.”
This so called “technical debt” was uncovered by an automated analysis of the structural quality of 288 applications from 75 companies over a three-year period, says Bill Curtis, chief scientist and senior vice president of CAST Research Labs.
The apps were typically multi-million dollar systems with 10,000 to 5 million lines of code and used in industries such as banking, insurance, telecom, energy and government. The main languages were mainframe Cobol, .Net, Java EE, C++ and Oracle 4GL.
Curtis says CAST reached the $1 million average debt figure by conservatively estimating what problems would be fixed and an average cost of fixing them of $2.82 per line of code.
Better understanding the breadth of the problem will help buyers make better application portfolio management decisions, says Matt Hotle, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst. CAST quotes Hotle as saying, “Addressing technical debt is really a risk decision for IT executives. I can invest in fixing some of the structural quality problems now, or risk that they result in outages, breaches or other problems that can cost far more than addressing the underlying technical problems.
Coincidentally, Gartner last week released a report saying global IT debt will reach $500 billion this year and could grow to $1 trillion by 2015. Gartner defines IT debt as “the cost of clearing the backlog of maintenance that would be required to bring the corporate applications portfolio to a fully supported current release state.”
To obtain an Executive Summary of CAST’s 2010 Annual Application Quality Study (the full report will be out later this fall), see here. For more information about Gartner’s report, “Measure and Manage your IT Debt”, go to https://www.gartner.com/resID=1419325.
