Atos saves 10-17% on application development and maintenance

Atos chose CAST Imaging to create and maintain automatically accurate, “always on” maps of the internal structures of their clients’ applications, which knowledge is key for industrializing software delivery.

Challenge

Atos clients expect added value by leveraging both the breadth and depth of Atos’s technology expertise for improved service, increased ROI, and better risk management.

Atos’s objective was to improve the speed of software delivery by industrializing the entire Application Development and Maintenance (ADM) process.

An additional challenge was to improve knowledge acquisition.

A common misconception is that knowledge transfer is achieved by documentation, but rarely is documentation detailed or accurate enough. Most often this knowledge is no longer held by anyone in the support team due to poor knowledge management or attrition.

Solution

Atos chose CAST Imaging to create and maintain automatically an accurate, “always on” map of the applications’ internal structures, which knowledge is key for industrializing software delivery.

The goal was to ease and speed up day-to-day ADM teams tasks, e.g.:

• understand where complexity lies and how transactions flow
• estimate coding and testing effort so changes can be planned and delivered quickly and accurately
• understand quickly where component coupling and cross-platform dependencies are
• provide quick and standard entry point to do investigation without manually trawling through code

Results

Atos started with two applications based on ASP, VB6, Java, C#, .NET with MS SQL Server, Sybase and Oracle databases. One team used CAST the other one did not.

Atos measured a 40% average effort savings for analysis tasks for the group using CAST as well as a 10% average savings for test planning, because CAST enabled accurate targeting of testing effort.

This equates to an overall efficiency savings of between 10% and 17% on a standard ADM project.

They also measured a 33% gain in application knowledge transfer.

Then CAST was rolled in the application service centers across Europe, with very similar results.