infoTECH Feature

September 16, 2014

New Software Certification Program Verifies Product Output

A software analysis company announced this past week that it has released a new certification program that seeks to verify the output of software and therefore provide businesses with a more in-depth look at how applications function under real-world conditions.

CAST announced this week its launch of the CAST Software Certification Program that the company says takes a step beyond traditional certification models. Whereas other models only certify the development process of software, CAST's system looks at the output of programs to determine their reliability, performance, efficiency, security, and maintainability. Lev Lesokhin, executive vice president of strategy and market development at CAST, provided a statement in the company announcement that compares software certification with engineering standards for roads and bridges.

"Software is an essential component of modern daily life, and if its structural integrity is not sound and secure, it can be harmful to businesses, financial markets and the public-at-large," Lesokhin said. "Buildings, roads and bridges must comply with engineering standards before they are integrated into public infrastructure. Similarly, software engineers need a way to measure the quality of newly developed or enhanced software—before they are deployed into environments that impact all of us. This standard model was not available until now."

The CAST website explains that its software certification is based on the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) standards for software quality, and those standards attempt to [http://it-cisq.org/standards-page/||measure software quality] in an automated, objective, economical, and technically feasible manner. It takes into consideration structural elements of software as well as violations of good architectural and coding practices such as copy and pasting as well as naming conventions.

The process begins near the release of a software product into production. CAST then gets secured access to the application's code and analyzes the code to determine quality and CISQ standards. If the software passes the measures, CAST then hosts the product certificate for businesses to access, print, and share. CAST asserts that the certification can be used to provide transparency about business practices to company shareholders and customers, and it can help place focus on the health of software that may be critical to organizations' operations.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
FOLLOW US

Subscribe to InfoTECH Spotlight eNews

InfoTECH Spotlight eNews delivers the latest news impacting technology in the IT industry each week. Sign up to receive FREE breaking news today!
FREE eNewsletter

infoTECH Whitepapers