In the first post I took a look at some of the challenges we faced within the data warehouse group that we hoped CAST could help us with. In this post, we will take a look at how the challenges were met by CAST.
The Solutions
To address the challenge of maintaining up-to-date, complete and accurate technical documentation of the data warehouse platform, CAST was used to analyze the production platform after every deliverable. The Enlighten tool was made available to all the internal and external staff working on data warehouse projects, and the web-site created by CAST was made available to the entire organization.
And because we also had several on-going projects (as everyone does), we would also analyze the UAT environments from time to time as well. This allowed the impact analysis to capture changes to a future version of the data warehouse platform as well as the current one.
The code quality analysis was reviewed on a periodic basis to keep track of the “hotspots”, as these problem areas would be included in projects that touched on those areas, so that the number of potential problem areas could be reduced over time.
The Benefits
By using CAST, we were able to reduce the costs of project affecting the data warehouse while increasing the quality of the deliverables. These cost saving were realized by having all the technical information of the platform in one place, always up-to-date, and easily available and navigatable. As well, by automating many of the otherwise manual tasks that never seem to get done, the cost of testing and doing impact analysis was signicantly reduced. Also, the abilty to set the expectations of quality and being able to measure those expectations objectively, let to better, more bug-free code being delivered on-time and under budget.
Recommendation
I highly recommend this product to anyone who has a large system or systems that they need to get under control or not lose control of. CAST helps to implement a layer of automated governance that can be otherwise far more expensive to implement, and, as mentioned above, can certainly reduce project costs through increased productivity and increased quality of deliverables. I haven’t worked on a project since where I didn’t wish CAST had been implemented there as well.
In the next post, I will look at some things that we could have done with CAST to further improve our business processes, and a couple of things to take into consideration when using CAST. If you have any questions, I urge you to contact them, and you can also leave questions in the comments below and I will answer the to the best of my ability.