Engineering highly reliable products
OPS Consulting's focus on customer success during software development has led to the development the Quality Assessment Capability, a proprietary product that quantifies the quality of software applications and allows us to engineer highly reliable and maintainable products. The assessment is conducted in a static environment and compares the software measures and metrics of the application against other domain specific applications and industry standards. There are several benefits to the acquisition professional using this suite of tools that assess software size, maintainability, complexity, and security features that directly drive a development program's acquisition and support costs.
Reuse:
QAC's suite of tools has the ability to independently identify, analyze, and evaluate a code's ability to be reused. Through these proprietary QAC developed tools – such as J-JOC, X-Ray, and Socket – QAC can quickly determine the code's quality, maintainability, and security posture for the cost estimator to determine the cost effectiveness of reusing this heritage software. This eliminates the ambiguity and potential pitfalls of incorporating reuse as a cost savings measure in software estimates. By effectively analyzing reuse or heritage code, the acquisition professional can now affect cost risk through proper code analysis.
Measure:
QAC has developed innovative tools and techniques that have automated software measurement for speed and accuracy. Through its CodeMetrics™ tool, which is also available in a GOTS form, QAC can quickly and easily count potentially any language type currently being used in the market today with the ease of a mouse click. Additionally, QAC employs the standard function point counting techniques of IFPUG, thus providing even more accuracy when measuring structured language development. Where QAC takes software estimation to the next generation is in the engagement of Object Oriented (OO) estimating. When software development programs use a more modern OO design method, which is becoming very common, traditional SLOC or Function Point counting can dangerously skew the size of the development effort. By matching an OO estimating method to its native OO development environment, QAC eliminated the common translation error and produces more accurate, more defendable, and more traceable cost estimates, thus keeping the acquisition professional on the cutting edge of software cost estimating techniques.
Estimating:
QAC works with existing estimating tools that have established track records in the estimating community, but where QAC goes beyond these parametric tools is in how it integrates them into one user format. QAC has developed a tool called AutoRisk™, which is also available in a GOTS form, that has greatly increased software estimating productivity through its simple user interface and convenient exportable outputs. Additionally, QAC has been integrated with one of the leading commercial tools for OO estimating. The incorporation of such tools into QAC allows the acquisition professional to stay current with modern development practices.
QAC Implementation
QAC is meant to be a lean application of software analysis, and the implementation of QAC capabilities is driven by the scope and expediency of the requirements. QAC can be implemented through the deployment of QAC analysts as an imbedded yet pooled group of resources at the disposal of estimating leadership. Depending on the scope and requirements, QAC analysts support the estimating team with developing the software specific portions of the estimate, and this allows for software- focused expertise working on this critical area of the larger system. By also pooling the QAC resources, QAC analysts track and manage software estimates across the enterprise synthesizing the resultant data and providing ever improving software metrics, development stating, and software final product analysis.
QAC Impact
QAC capabilities have been employed on several programs with the DoD and Intelligence community, and our tools have been used to analyze over 200 million lines of code on hundreds of software programs.
In summary, QAC provides the most extensive and technologically advanced software estimating capability available on the market. The developed and commercial tools we bring, along with our growing staff of qualified software professionals, provide cost estimating agencies with the power and insight needed to accurately estimate the most complex acquisition programs today.
Download the OPS Consulting Capabilities Overview.