October 16, 2014—New York—CAST, a leader in software analysis and measurement, today announced an update to its Application Intelligence Platform (AIP). AIP 7.3 makes measuring software quality across an organization’s application portfolio more automated, informative, and customizable.

In AIP 7.3, CAST introduces several ease of use enhancements to its Application Analytics Dashboard (AAD) that allow product managers and CIOs alike to discover actionable insights faster and more easily. New ways to filter and a new view of quality measures from multiple software releases expands the organizations’ ability to quickly zoom in on the relevant quality issues and pinpoint specific changes between application versions. An added user management function enables administrators to allocate distinct access rights, enabling development teams to focus in on what is important to them.

AIP’s expanded API capabilities enable organizations to integrate action plans made within the platform directly into their third-party dashboards or bug tracking software. Each time a quality check runs during the software development lifecycle, identified violations can be automatically added to an organization’s bug-tracking software (e.g. Jira) for investigation and correction. Because of this automation, project leads can sustain an easy-to-follow workflow for themselves and their team, enabling them to focus on IT innovation rather than tedious upkeep of a bug-tracking database.

Also, new to AIP is the ability to automatically process the dynamic links that serve as the basis for function point counting. This new capability substantially increases the amount of automation in the initial setup to count function points and reduces the amount of time needed to get going.

“Using function points to measure software development output isn’t perfect, but it’s a much better measure than using lines of code or just relying on input metrics,” says Olivier Bonsignour, Executive Vice President of Product Development, of CAST. “A lot of companies have attempted to count function points manually in the past with a limited number of experts, but it was very difficult to get high-quality data at scale. With AIP 7.3 you can integrate collection of function point data into your software development lifecycle with minimal up-front set up and get consistent, high-quality results.”

Also new to AIP 7.3 is the ability for an organization to incorporate external metrics — anything from number of errors in production, man-hours invested, or data pulled from a third-party bug tracking tools — directly into the Application Analytics Dashboard.

“Analytics have become an invaluable tool for IT organizations to succeed, but many IT executives don’t know how to make the business case and instead opt for simple skunk-works metrics that are less accurate and more expensive,” says Lev Lesokhin, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Market Development, at CAST. “This release of our Application Intelligence Platform is poised to make high-quality software metrics more integrated through our new API, less complex to set-up and customize, and easier than ever to automate. AIP 7.3 is a vital tool for application owners and vice presidents of development that want to turn their development team into an engine for innovation rather than a bug-tracking maintenance crew.”

Also included in the new release:
o Expanded coverage of rules:
o 6 new J2EE rules that follow the CISQ standards for software quality
o Additional technology coverage:
o Oracle Forms and Reports,
o .NET 4.5 & 4.5.1 for C-#
o Visual Studio 2012 & 2013
o Reintroduced support for SAP Business Objects.
o Updates to connect to SQLServer 2012 and DB2 10.5.