The insurance management system at Allianz Austria is used to manage over 10 million customers and process 8 million claims a year. Allianz implemented CAST as part of a Quality Management initiative and have seen substantial savings in time devoted to bug correction and have increased user satisfaction.

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Context
HerrTik, could you first describe Allianz
Austria’s IT department and applications?
Allianz Austria is a subsidiary of the Allianz
Insurance Group. Our insurance manage-
ment system is used to manage 10 million
customers and process 8 million claims a
year the system addresses all activities such
as CRM, field sales support, claim manage-
ment and processing, workflow...The system
has been very successful and it has been
sold to an Allianz subsidiary in Europe as well
as to some non-Allianz companies such as
Swiss Life Germany. Technically, the system
operates on 3 platforms: DB2/MVS centrally,
DB2/NT in remote offices and Sybase SQL
Anywhere on agent laptops. There are 2.5
million code lines written in various languages
such as PowerBuilder, C++, Java, and HTML.
The Problem
What were the challenges you were
faced with?
As an example, we have 30 developers
working on 300 Requests For Change (RFC)
per year, which represent 700,000 code lines
added or modified. As a result of this fast
pace of change, our code base doubled in
size between 2001 and 2003. I saw the time
my development team was devoting to bug
correction increase from 15% to 30%. It be-
came clear to us that if we did not get really
serious about software quality management,
the team would soon have to spend 100% of
its time correcting bugs and we would hit the
wall. So we decided to launch a major quality
management initiative.
Could you describe this Quality Management
Initiative?
We wanted to improve the quality of our ap-
plication development activities from several
standpoints: processes, software design,
programming practices, application architec-
ture and documentation. We first defined with
the team what our quality goals were in each
area. We also identified what our goal attain-
ment criteria would be, then how we would
actually measure them and finally how we
would compensate employees to align their
activities with our business goals.
As a result, we now regularly appraise
projects and employees based on “Quality
Certificates” that are granted thanks to the
information delivered by our Quality Manage-
ment System.
The Solution
What role does CAST play in your Quality
Management System and why did you choose it?
We needed two underlying systems to enable
our quality initiative:
• A Project Management System to manage
our development and change management
processes and to keep track of each team
member’s activities.
CAST Forum on Application Intelligence
Interview with Herr Thomas TIK Head of Development,
Distributed Systems Allianz Austria
“We looked at vendors for
the Quality Measurement
System.We found out that
only CAST would deliver
the programmable quality
measurement system
we needed to enforce our
company–specific rules.”
Herr Thomas TIK,Head of Development
Distributed Systems Allianz Austria

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• An Automated Quality Measurement
System that could regularly deliver objec-
tive measurements based on our specific
requirements.
We developed the Project Management
System internally and tied it to our Clear Case
Configuration Management System from
Rational. It manages half of the information
we need.
Then we looked at vendors for the Quality
Measurement System. We found out that only
CAST would deliver the programmable quality
measurement system we needed to enforce
our company–specific rules. CAST proved
to be the only vendor that would perform
the analysis of all our different development
environments and do it in a consistent man-
ner. Furthermore, CAST did not just analyze
language layers one-by-one in an isolated
manner, but analyzed applications as a whole.
This is a key feature for measuring application
architecture quality.
How did you implement CAST?
CAST provided 5 days of consulting to imple-
ment the software, including configuring the
parsers and the knowledge base. It took
us 60 days in total to define the processes
supporting our initiative such as the quality
assurance requirements and the associated
metrics. Finally, we developed the SQL que-
ries and reports needed to extract data from
the CAST Knowledge Base. It is important
to understand how CAST works: traditional
quality measurement software only delivers
standard metrics based on quality assur-
ance theory. CAST analyzes whole applica-
tions, stores a multitude of metadata and
then allows you to get answers to all sorts of
specific application management questions
by querying the knowledge base. We thus
defined the specific reports we wanted to en-
force our quality rules and then programmed
the reports into CAST. What is great about
CAST is that you don’t just get metrics, you
also get an exhaustive list of all the artifacts
that are not compliant with your rules. We can
then ask our development teams to focus on
fixing these specific artifacts. It makes quality
assurance truly operational by allowing us to
go beyond quality assessment and do actual
quality enforcement. Since the quality assess-
ment is automated, we were able to analyze
40 projects in 2003 and we will analyze 45
additional ones in 2004.
The Results
What were the business results of your quality
initiative?
We now analyze applications weekly and the
results are immediately made available to
the teams. By tightly integrating configura-
tion management, project management and
CAST’s application knowledge base, we
have reached a very mature level of project
and quality management capability. During a
given period of time, we precisely know who
has done what, what a team member has
produced, how much functionality, volume
of code and complexity was brought into the
system and we get a quality assessment of
the work done.
Managers can perform in-depth, objective
reviews with their teams based on facts
and objective information. We have 2 formal
employee appraisals per year and 80% of
employee bonuses are tied to their perfor-
mance in terms of the quantity and the quality
of the work produced, as measured by CAST
and our project management software. Bonus
compensation is 20% of total salary. In terms
of “Quality Certificates”, projects reached
73% of quality goals on average last year; the
top performer reached 95%.
Our improved project management process
and the success of our quality initiative have
resulted in substantial savings in time de-
voted to bug correction and have increased
user satisfaction. Overall, we have achieved
a 230% increase in application functional-
ity with a 20% annual cost reduction over 3
years.
“By tightly integrating
configuration management,
project management
and CAST’s application
knowledge base, we have
reached a very mature
level of project and quality
management capability.”

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Conclusion
How do you see yourself using CAST in
the future?
Our future plans include the possibility to
extend our insurance management software
platform to others so that it can be adopted
by several insurance companies.
“Our improved project
management process and
the success of our quality
initiative have resulted in
substantial savings in time
devoted to bug correction
and have increased user
satisfaction. Overall, we
have achieved a 230%
increase in application
functionality with a 20%
annual cost reduction over
3 years.”