CASE STUDY
Atos saves 10-17% on application development and maintenance
Atos is a global IT services and consulting leader specializing in digital transformation, with over 100,000 employees in 69 countries and annual revenue of € 11 billion.
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.
The efficiency gains gave direct returns to our clients both in cost and quality.
Jon Baker
Lead Delivery Manager, AMS
10-17% savings
in overall efficiency of application development and maintenance
40% less
time spent for
analysis tasks
33% faster
transfer of
application knowledge
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.
