CAST (company)

Last updated
CAST
Company type Private
Industry ISV
FoundedNovember 1990, in Paris, France
FounderVincent Delaroche
HeadquartersEU Hqs: Meudon near Paris
US Hqs: New York City
Key people
Vincent Delaroche, Chairman and CEO,
Bill Curtis, Chief Scientist,
Ernie Hu, Chief Operating Officer,
Alexandre Rerolle, group CFO
ProductsCAST Highlight
CAST Imaging
Owner Bridgepoint Group (2022-present)
Number of employees
380 (2019)
Website www.castsoftware.com

CAST is a technology corporation headquartered in New York City and France, near Paris. It was founded in 1990 in Paris, France, by Vincent Delaroche.

Contents

The firm markets products that generate software intelligence, with a technology based on semantic analysis of software source code and components. In addition, CAST offers hosting and consulting services.

On May 18, 2022, the company and Bridgepoint Group announced entering into exclusive negotiations for the acquisition by Bridgepoint Development Capital funds of a majority stake in CAST to support the development of the Software intelligence market in the coming decade. [1]

On July 21, 2022, Bridgepoint Group acquired a majority stake, while Vincent Deleroche rolled over the majority of his shares and the management invested into the new holding, Financière Da Vinci alongside Bridgepoint Group and Vincent Delaroche. Following the transaction, Vincent Delaroche and the executive team in place have continued to manage the company's activities as President of Financière Da Vinci and CEO of CAST. [2]

History

CAST was founded in 1990 in Paris by Vincent Delaroche. In 1996, it shipped its first software product based on semantic analysis of code. CAST Application Intelligence Platform (CAST AIP), was first launched in 2004, initially introducing software quality measurement. In 2012, the firm announced support for the Object Management Group (OMG) Automated Function Point (AFP) Standard, [3] one way of measuring application development productivity.

In 2017, CAST Highlight is launched as a SaaS product scanning portfolio of software to provide metrics on health, cloud migration capabilities, and Open-source license risks.

In early 2019, CAST AIP is re-branded and becomes CAST Imaging, a product representing graphically the inner workings of software systems.

The firm's leadership includes Bill Curtis, who developed the Capability Maturity Model at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in the early 1990s and then the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ).

CAST's head of product development, Olivier Bonsignour, co-wrote a book with Capers Jones. [4]

Products

CAST provides 2 sets of products of different technologies, pricing, implementation models, and usage: CAST Highlight and CAST Imaging.

CAST Highlight

CAST Highlight is a SaaS product for performing rapid application portfolio analysis. It analyzes the source code of applications to assess their cloud readiness, [5] technical debt, Open-source risks, and computes a green index. Software insights collected from the source code analysis may also be correlated with built-in qualitative surveys for adding business context insights on top of technical information.

CAST Imaging

CAST Imaging reverse-engineers all database structures, code components, and interdependencies in custom-built applications. It provides interactive architecture blueprints, data-call graphs, and end-to-end transaction flows in a Web application with the ability to export details externally. [6] CAST Imaging’s ability to understand the application's inner workings, and map the internal dependencies between all its elements, allows it to also identify structural flaws standardized by ISO (ISO-5055) and classified under Robustness, Efficiency (performance, consumption), Security and Maintainability. [7]

Research

The firm's Research Labs subsidiary developed a repository of industry data and issued a biennial report called CAST Research on Application Software Health (CRASH). CRASH data has been cited and published in articles in IEEE Software and research. [8] Its Labs were active in analyzing the phenomenon of technical debt, co-hosting a research forum on this topic with the University of Maryland’s Department of Information Systems. [9] [10]

Technical debt 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. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Software</span> Non-tangible executable component of a computer

Software is defined narrowly as unambiguous instructions that can be transformed into a form executable on computer hardware, or more broadly including supporting concepts, tools and methods needed to make the computer system operational.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Object Management Group</span> Computer industry standards consortium

The Object Management Group (OMG) is a computer industry standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a range of technologies.

In computer science, static program analysis is the analysis of computer programs performed without executing them, in contrast with dynamic program analysis, which is performed on programs during their execution in the integrated environment.

Software AG is a German multinational software corporation that develops enterprise software for business process management, integration, and big data analytics. Founded in 1969, the company is headquartered in Darmstadt, Germany, and has offices worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer-aided software engineering</span> Domain of software tools

Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) is a domain of software tools used to design and implement applications. CASE tools are similar to and are partly inspired by computer-aided design (CAD) tools used for designing hardware products. CASE tools are intended to help develop high-quality, defect-free, and maintainable software. CASE software was often associated with methods for the development of information systems together with automated tools that could be used in the software development process.

In system administration, orchestration is the automated configuring, coordinating, and managing of computer systems and software.

In the context of software engineering, software quality refers to two related but distinct notions:

Software visualization or software visualisation refers to the visualization of information of and related to software systems—either the architecture of its source code or metrics of their runtime behavior—and their development process by means of static, interactive or animated 2-D or 3-D visual representations of their structure, execution, behavior, and evolution.

Software assurance (SwA) is a critical process in software development that ensures the reliability, safety, and security of software products. It involves a variety of activities, including requirements analysis, design reviews, code inspections, testing, and formal verification. One crucial component of software assurance is secure coding practices, which follow industry-accepted standards and best practices, such as those outlined by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in their CERT Secure Coding Standards (SCS).

The function point is a "unit of measurement" to express the amount of business functionality an information system provides to a user. Function points are used to compute a functional size measurement (FSM) of software. The cost of a single unit is calculated from past projects.

Sysquake is a numerical computing environment and a programming language mostly-compatible with MATLAB. It offers facilities for interactive graphics which give insights into the problems being analyzed. It is used in teaching, research, and engineering.

Legacy modernization, also known as software modernization or platform modernization, refers to the conversion, rewriting or porting of a legacy system to modern computer programming languages, architectures, software libraries, protocols or hardware platforms. Legacy transformation aims to retain and extend the value of the legacy investment through migration to new platforms to benefit from the advantage of the new technologies.

Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) is a publicly available specification from the Object Management Group (OMG). KDM is a common intermediate representation for existing software systems and their operating environments, that defines common metadata required for deep semantic integration of Application Lifecycle Management tools. KDM was designed as the OMG's foundation for software modernization, IT portfolio management and software assurance. KDM uses OMG's Meta-Object Facility to define an XMI interchange format between tools that work with existing software as well as an abstract interface (API) for the next-generation assurance and modernization tools. KDM standardizes existing approaches to knowledge discovery in software engineering artifacts, also known as software mining.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Parasoft</span> Software testing framework

Parasoft is an independent software vendor specializing in automated software testing and application security with headquarters in Monrovia, California. It was founded in 1987 by four graduates of the California Institute of Technology who planned to commercialize the parallel computing software tools they had been working on for the Caltech Cosmic Cube, which was the first working hypercube computer built.

Software analytics is the analytics specific to the domain of software systems taking into account source code, static and dynamic characteristics as well as related processes of their development and evolution. It aims at describing, monitoring, predicting, and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of software engineering throughout the software lifecycle, in particular during software development and software maintenance. The data collection is typically done by mining software repositories, but can also be achieved by collecting user actions or production data.

Bill Curtis is a software engineer best known for leading the development of the Capability Maturity Model and the People CMM in the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and for championing the spread of software process improvement and software measurement globally. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to software process improvement and measurement. He was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to software process, software measurement, and human factors in software engineering".

Software intelligence is insight into the inner workings and structural condition of software assets produced by software designed to analyze database structure, software framework and source code to better understand and control complex software systems in information technology environments. Similarly to business intelligence (BI), software intelligence is produced by a set of software tools and techniques for the mining of data and the software's inner-structure. Results are automatically produced and feed a knowledge base containing technical documentation and blueprints of the innerworking of applications, and make it available to all to be used by business and software stakeholders to make informed decisions, measure the efficiency of software development organizations, communicate about the software health, prevent software catastrophes.

Perforce Software, Inc. is an American developer of software used for developing and running applications, including version control software, web-based repository management, developer collaboration, application lifecycle management, web application servers, debugging tools and agile planning software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CodeScene</span> Behavioral code analysis tool

CodeScene is a behavioral code analysis tool developed by Empear AB. CodeScene provides code visualizations based on version-control data and machine learning algorithms that identify social patterns and hidden risks in code.

Static application security testing (SAST) is used to secure software by reviewing the source code of the software to identify sources of vulnerabilities. Although the process of statically analyzing the source code has existed as long as computers have existed, the technique spread to security in the late 90s and the first public discussion of SQL injection in 1998 when Web applications integrated new technologies like JavaScript and Flash.

References

  1. ↑ "Entrée en négociations exclusives des principaux actionnaires de CAST avec une société contrôlée par Bridgepoint SAS en vue de l'acquisition par les fonds Bridgepoint Development Capital d'une participation majoritaire dans CAST, suivie d'une offre". Actusnews Wire (in French). Retrieved 2023-01-23.
  2. ↑ "Completion of a majority stake acquisition of Cast by Bridgepoint". Actusnews Wire. Archived from the original on 2022-12-16. Retrieved 2022-12-16.
  3. ↑ "OMG Adopts Automated Function Point Specification, January 17, 2013". Archived from the original on 2013-05-09. Retrieved 2013-06-23.
  4. ↑ Jones, Capers; Bonsignour, Olivier (2011). The Economics of Software Quality. Addison-Wesley. ISBN   978-0-132-58220-9.
  5. ↑ Ramchand, Kent; Baruwal Chhetri, Mohan; Kowalczyk, Ryszard (Jan 2021). "Enterprise adoption of cloud computing with application portfolio profiling and application portfolio assessment". Journal of Cloud Computing. 10 (1). doi: 10.1186/s13677-020-00210-w . S2CID   256237745.
  6. ↑ Lloyd, Jeremy (Dec 2022). Infrastructure Leader's Guide to Google Cloud: Lead Your Organization's Google Cloud Adoption, Migration and Modernization Journey. UK: Apress, Berkeley, CA. p. 169-180. doi:10.1007/978-1-4842-8820-7_15. ISBN   978-1-4842-8819-1.
  7. ↑ Curtis, Bill; Martin, Robert; Douziech, Philippe-Emmanuel (March 2022). "Measuring the Structural Quality of Software Systems". Computer. 55 (3). IEEE: 87–90. doi: 10.1109/MC.2022.3145265 . S2CID   247492481.
  8. ↑ Plösch, Reinhold; Bräuer, Johannes; Saft, Matthias; Körner, Christian (May 2018). "Design debt prioritization". Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Technical Debt. IEEE. pp. 95–104. doi:10.1145/3194164.3194172. ISBN   978-1-4503-5713-5. S2CID   50772086.
  9. ↑ "Java apps have most flaws, Cobol apps the least, study finds". Computer World. December 8, 2011. Archived from the original on November 22, 2012. Retrieved June 23, 2013.
  10. ↑ "Bad code plagues business applications, especially Java ones". ars technica. December 8, 2011.
  11. ↑ Ernst, N. A.; Bellomo, S.; Ozkaya, I.; Nord, R. L. (April 2017). "What to Fix? Distinguishing between Design and Non-design Rules in Automated Tools". 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA). IEEE. pp. 165–168. arXiv: 1705.11087 . doi:10.1109/ICSA.2017.25. ISBN   978-1-5090-5729-0. S2CID   27116442.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.