Similarly, a manufacturing company could be hurt because a piece of software it depended upon failed. Software failures also can result in lost revenue, he said, citing Hershey Foods, which claimed to have lost money as a result of an incomplete software project causing the inability to ship candy in time for Halloween 1999. The issue of liability is a relatively new one, Payne said, as companies try to hold software vendors responsible for lost business due to software failure. The trend for this began as companies sought out Y2K-related bugs within their organizations. Finally, there is the lost productivity of workers unable to do their jobs because back-end systems fail, or Web applications do not work and employees cannot do what they are paid to do.
Software is the lifeblood of a business.
It must work. To that end, Cigital is packaging and branding a service incorporating its expertise in risk assessment with proprietary technologies. Called Cigital Advantage, it is intended to identify risks and implement risk mitigation from the very beginning of the development cycle, straddling the gap between business managers and the technical staff. As part of the design team in the development cycle, Cigital represents the business during software architectural planning. It assesses and measures every artifact produced, providing code review, design review and security assessment as well as configuration management, bug tracking, QA and coverage analysis, Payne said.