Time is of the essence for IT organizations so we’ve taken steps to speed up the application onboarding process in CAST Highlight. Our latest release delivers a variety of new features and improvements that will ease administration for Portfolio Managers and get your organization up and running faster. This release also includes enhancements to the local agent and a new page in the CAST Highlight portal that visualizes the distribution of risk for each application in the portfolio. Read on to find out more about the latest enhancements to CAST Highlight.

What’s new in CAST Highlight

Administration

• Easily find applications, users, business units and campaigns in the Plan section with dynamic search and filtering capabilities.
• Easily create user accounts for Portfolio Managers, Contributors and Viewers by copying and pasting lists of email addresses directly into the portal.
• Associate multiple applications to a business unit at one time, on one screen, in the Plan section.
• Use the Windows command line to create application records in bulk from an Excel file and assign business units and Contributors to each application.

Survey Management

• The Business Value survey now enables users to enter an integer for the average number of people (FTE) that worked on the code over the last 12 months, as opposed to a number range. This input is a component of the calculation of the Software Maintenance “Actual” figure, and ensures a more accurate FTE count.
• The Software Maintenance Estimation, based on the COCOMO II cost estimation engine, now incorporates additional survey inputs.
• The following question has been added to the survey and is used as a driver for the Estimate: “What is the percentage of change to the base code in the last 12 months?” The recommended value for most applications is 15%, as defined by the COCOMO II model. Users can input another percentage if desired, depending on the specific application.
• Additionally, the input for the question ‘What percentage of the development effort has been spent on maintenance in the last 12 months?’ is now used as a driver for the Software Maintenance “Actual” figure.

Viewing Analysis Results

• Simplified navigation: Business Value by Risk and by Technical Debt, Technology Mix by Portfolio and Application, and Technical Debt Distribution and Trends are all displayed on single pages for easy viewing.
• Redesigned application details page shows trending of risk and complexity metrics, additional indicators and risk distribution graph in a single view. Toggle to Survey Data tab to view survey questions and answers.
• Assess the risk distribution for each application across the portfolio on a single page. Visualizations now show risk distribution by files. Drill down into the risk distribution by programming language.
• Click the new menu icon at the upper-right side of the screen on the Risk Mapping and Business Value Distribution bubble charts to display a list of the applications in the portfolio. Select applications from the list and easily locate them on the charts.

New Version of the Local Agent

• COBOL analyzer refactored to make code scans faster.
• End of File (EOF) now recognized as an object separator in SQL file processing.