Posts by juancar

Technical debt infection

Posted by Juan Carlos Castromil on Apr 18, 2013 in Development, Technical debt | 2 comments

Imagine that your company has software maintenance issues, perhaps one reason is the technical debt you have, even if you are not aware of it. Many of the clients I deal with on pre-sales meetings, don’t know why, year after year, have maintenance cost growth, and they are not even familiar with the “technical debt” concept.

I have recently read a very interesting article by Steve Garnett. I would like to share with you some of the concepts presented in it, using a dummy situation between a doctor and her patient.

Reducing MIPS

Posted by Juan Carlos Castromil on Mar 14, 2013 in Customer use cases, Economics | 0 comments

Here at Optimyth Software, until now, we have focused in reducing our customer’s software maintenance cost with our solutions. This doesn’t mean cost reduction is the only benefit our customers get when they implement our solutions, they can help as well in other aspects with different flavors: effective use of software and hardware resources, compliance with application security best practices, improve reliability of the code developed in different programming languages and more.

The benefits of knowing the complexity of your applications

Posted by Juan Carlos Castromil on Nov 12, 2012 in Customer use cases | 0 comments

One day, a student of philosophy approached Diogenes of Sinope, introduced himself and said “if it pleases you, sir, let me prove to you that there is no such thing as motion”. Whereupon Diogenes got up and walked out of the room. Diogenes proved motion just by walking…

Putting aside Diogenes’ cynicism, let’s prove the benefits of Application Inventory Management just by telling you how one of our customers started doing amazing things just exploiting their automatically generated application models with checKing AIM.

A CMMI certificate alone is not enough

Posted by Juan Carlos Castromil on Sep 24, 2012 in Software quality | 1 comment

Sometime ago in my one of my previous articles, Have you ever thought what quality means for you?, I finished asking a new question: Do you think that a software product can reach the level of quality you need supported by a process without quality? Maybe not, but let’s reverse the question, does a quality development process assure the quality of the software product?

Function Points, or not Function Points: that is the question

Posted by Juan Carlos Castromil on Jul 19, 2012 in Economics, Quality metrics | 3 comments

I have recently read an article in the Chronologist blog, by Steve Tendon, with a title that caught my attention: ”Function Points Are Fantasy Points”. Steve analyzes Function Points as a metric to estimate project effort that is no longer valid for modern applications, in particular contemporary web applications.

I agree that Function Points are an outdated metric. But you still have to estimate. A lot of money is at stake here.