Itestra

In numerous enterprises, business-critical business processes are supported by extensive information systems, which comprise several million lines of program code as well as vast amounts of important data. These systems are further developed, maintained, and run continuously for decades. Due to their age, they contain extensive, detailed, and valuable knowledge about the processes supported.

In consequence, the value represented by these systems is very high. Already under the simplified assumption that the expense of restoring one line of code was 25 EUR, the costs to restore a system of 2 million lines of code were 50 mio. EUR. The capital value from a business process perspective is to be estimated high as well.

With growing age of systems, their owners are faced with a loss of this value as a consequence of a continuous quality decay manifesting itself in increasing costs and decreasing reliability. Effort for changes grows, grown amounts of data are no longer processed efficiently, and in further development, the error rate is on the increase. In case the original developers are no longer available, whole system components are to be treated as black boxes and can no longer be bug-fixed, changed, or optimized. The systems have to be replaced in the course of large, risk-intensive projects and a significant part of the value is lost.

The avoidable extra expenses caused by high resource use, system break-downs, as well as aggravated maintenance and further development are significant and consume an important part of the IT budget. The key for optimizing the resource use lies in the improvement of the software systems´ technical quality.

Studies show that already simple measures like the removal of unused and redundant software components can realize yearly savings of a 6-digit Euro amount. Implementing measures to increase quality not only releases formerly bound budget to optimization and new development projects. It also secures the value of already placed spending.

Requirement for a successful optimization is the identification of deficits with an economical impact. In the course of a Software Health Check, itestra carries out an extensive analysis of a software system and creates an integrated quality and profitability profile of the system inspected and its technical and organizational environment. Based from this profile, recommendations for the optimal use of spending are derived.

The approach employed is based on the quality model TUM-QM, which was developed by itestra in cooperation with Technische Universität München. Contrary to conventional quality models, this model maps the abstract term “quality” to traceable criteria and their economical consequences.

All test criteria are determined using innovative tools, interviews with the persons in response, as well as manual inspection. Based on a comparison of the results with benchmarks, experts recommend concrete step-by-step actions to increase profitability.