CAST (company)


CAST is a technology corporation, with headquarters in New York City and in France, near Paris. CAST markets software quality and size measurement technology and expertise, and offers software, hosting and consulting services in support software analysis and measurement. The company was founded in 1990 in Paris, France, by Vincent Delaroche.
CAST code quality metrics are frequently used in application development service-level agreements. CAST research and experts are often consulted on issues having to do with development quality and security by medias such as Los Angeles Times, BBC, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.

History

CAST was founded in 1990 in Paris by Vincent Delaroche. In 1996 CAST shipped its first software product, an interactive development environment for building database SQL stored procedures. In 2001, the company introduced software quality measurement into its analysis products. CAST Application Intelligence Platform, its current flagship product, was first launched in 2004.
In 2012, CAST announced support for the Object Management Group Automated Function Point Standard, an effective way to measure application development productivity.
CAST leadership includes Bill Curtis, who developed the Capability Maturity Model at the Software Engineering Institute in the early 1990s and then the Consortium for IT Software Quality.
CAST's head of product development, Olivier Bonsignour, co-wrote a book with Capers Jones.

Research

CAST’s Research Labs subsidiary developed a repository of industry data and issues a biennial report called CAST Research on Application Software Health. CRASH data has been cited and published in articles in IEEE Software and researches. CAST Research Labs was active in analyzing the phenomenon of technical debt, co-hosting a research forum on this topic with University of Maryland’s department of information systems.
CAST 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
. Among them the project which leads to the detection of security problems at the architectural level in response to the need acknowledged by Hoglung, G and McGraw, G in Exploiting Software.
CAST was recognized by Oseo in 2009 and awarded the "Innovative Company" label. This recognition was renewed in 2012 through another project aiming at identifying the possible resource leaks that can contribute to application performance decrease or application crashes, at the application level across the layers and without requiring the actual execution of the application as is usually the case in dynamic program analysis.