Vincent Delaroche, CEO and founder of CAST, explores the challenge facing tech firm software quality to keep up in the digital age
Recent high-profile IT outages have indicated a systemic weakness in UK businesses. Despite the progress in infrastructure robustness, IT businesses still suffer database, hardware and software outages regularly. However, as technology advances, so do the threats. UK businesses must be alert for modern-day innovative cyber threats as well as faulty code quality.
Given the increasing amount of costly outages in the last year, such as those experienced by RBS, HSBC, the Post Office and most recently the official voter registration page for the EU Referendum, IT system outages have become a hot topic. Further afield, the now-infamous Bangladeshi Bank hack has also stressed the importance for organisations to clean-up their IT systems at a structural level. For tech startups who have a clean slate, this presents a challenge to stay ahead of the competition in the increasingly digital world.
Across all industries, system outages, data corruption, scalability and cyber security present major obstacles for those failing to address underlying software risk issues. These challenges are magnified by many software weaknesses not being detected by traditional testing methods. This requires an in-depth analysis, beyond the traditional code analysis, which helps organisations detect the most dangerous structural flaws in their systems. Structural performance insights will help management identify where the flaws are and which flaws have the biggest impact on business operations. With 50% of security problems occurring in software design and architecture, in-depth analysis is vital to ensure up-to-scratch performance.
The founding pillar
In the digital age, software is the founding pillar of modern-day business success. Companies in retail, banking or manufacturing are becoming technology companies. Amazon, for example, has helped to usher-in this tectonic change. The ‘FinTechs’ have come onto the scene and disrupted core banking institutions. All organisations, regardless of industry, must embrace technology, or they risk becoming irrelevant.
As companies move towards digitisation, system failures can present an ongoing problem as legacy systems are refashioned and migrated over to new, agile environments. The world is turning digital, and it’s taking no prisoners. According to the IT Process Institute, resolution time per system outage is around 200 minutes. A typical large IT organisation will see as many as 20,000 software related incidents per year. When so much is on the line – customer experience, brand reputation and costly fines – it is amazing to see the, often, lacklustre attitudes towards software quality.
Struggling to adapt?
Complexity: There is a tendency to make the simple complex. I’ve been part of transactions where large IT organisations were spending £2 to buy £1, which doesn’t make sense at all. Through our own analysis into the software performance of the financial sector, we found that Brits are far less modularised than their European and US counterparts. When the code written is twice as long, the exposure to glitches and faults increases. Complex code also results in businesses taking twice as long to get to the root cause when a glitch or outage happens.
Outsourcing: UK businesses are more likely to outsource their software coding and maintenance, often to countries such as India. Whilst outsourcing has many benefits, it can often result in a loss of control as the software applications come back into the organisation with different levels of quality control, code written to different standards, and so on. One person’s idea of excellent code could be different to another’s. By instituting regular measurement of outsourced applications, you’re offshoring everything but your judgements.
Legacy tech: As businesses try to adapt to meet modern consumer expectations, they are often building new software on legacy systems. This is particularly poignant for the ‘old school’ banks and insurance businesses, with some even running applications on systems more than thirty years old. British coders are using mainstream and ‘old school’ technologies to support such applications, with a higher blend of COBOL, and a lower blend of modern methodologies like DevOps and Agile.
‘Business’ emphasis lacking: Too often, IT shops are run by CFOs, not business people. As more traditional business organisations turn into technology shops, these organisations need to be more strategic about the way they operate their software landscape. IT and business teams need to buddy up to fully leverage the technology currently available. Software must be designed to meet the long term business needs, even with cost pressures demanding greater functionality and performance for less.
The challenges
Modern day CIOs need to know how they are using their assets, what IT budget cuts they can achieve without impacting performance, whether their software would pass security audit checks and who on their team makes sure critical software flaws are avoided. Throughout digital transformation projects, CIOs also need insight into the impact software enhancements will have on the overall system in order to avoid potential software risk areas. Technology businesses starting from scratch have an advantage. They can build strong and functional applications from the start. Those with legacy systems don’t have that luxury.
Whilst the challenges remain, there is an opportunity for those who are willing to address software quality issues and build better, more reliable and more secure technologies. Poor software quality, if unaddressed, will continue to let UK businesses down in the digitally enabled world we live in today.