In this issue of Research Roundup, we will take a look at two new pieces of research from Forrester and Gartner.

According to Gartner, the demand for offshore outsourcing continues to grow. In order to allow companies to cut through this clutter and distinguish between the contenders and the pretenders, Gartner publishes Magic Quadrant™ assessments. This month, we are presenting an excerpt of Gartner's latest Offshore Outsourcing Magic Quadrant™.

Also, we'll find out what Forrester Research has to say about the offshore application testing market.

The Metrics Game: Framework For Definition And Implementation

What You’ll Learn: How to choose which metrics are most appropriate for measuring software quality, and how to incorporate those metrics into a measurement framework.

Software measurement is a challenging but essential component of a healthy and highly capable software engineering culture. To achieve assessment at Level 4 of CMMI, an organization must demonstrate that its process capability and product quality is measured quantitatively. However, the model does not specify the list of metrics that should be used. It is left to the organization to decide on a set of metrics it would like to measure, monitor and improve.

In this article, we outline a framework for developing a metrics program for your organization.

Reverse Engineering Delivers Solid Foundation

This global financial services giant needed to scale its capacity to issue stored value cards such as gift cards and branded store cards for various retailers. Growing customer demand was quickly outpacing their antiquated system's abilities! The decision to completely rebuild the system was handed over to Syntel to execute. The project's first phase of reengineering presented two key challenges...

According to Forrester, the average IT organization spends up to 45% of its operational budget on unplanned work. Forrester recommends choosing a balanced mix of metrics to get a true idea of how your organization is functioning.

Source: Forrester

THIS ISSUE: Financial Services

What You'll Learn: Sometimes to achieve compliance to regulatory changes, it helps to take a new look at your entire technology ecosystem .