If I talk about improvements for CAST Highlight, I would suggest three things. The first is better understanding or niche understanding. Right now, the intent matching is strong for general topics such as ease of use, but for niche B2B terms such as HIPAA compliance or multi-tenant architecture, it sometimes misses context. Improving the domain-specific models would make highlights more accurate for these verticals. The second improvement is more control over the deduplication logic. CAST Highlight's deduplication is great for avoiding spam, but sometimes we want two similar quotes if they are from very different company sizes, such as SMB versus enterprise perspectives on pricing. A slider to adjust deduplication strictness would help. The third suggestion I would like to give is deeper sentiment and outcome tagging. While it has core sentiment capabilities, it does not tag outcomes automatically. For instance, if a quote mentions saved $50,000 per year, tagging that as cost savings $50,000 would let us build ROI charts instantly instead of reading each quote manually. Regarding user experience, integrations, and reporting, I think there is room to enhance those aspects. Regarding user experience, I would suggest improving user actions in terms of bulk actions and keyboard shortcuts. Day-to-day analysts review 50-plus suggested quotes, and currently it is mostly clicking to approve one by one. Adding bulk approve or reject options and keyboard shortcuts would significantly reduce the time taken. A small UX change can lead to a big speed boost. The second point is integrations when pushing to the CMS and Slack alerts. Right now, we export approved highlights manually from CAST Highlight. If CAST Highlight could push directly to our CMS or send Slack alerts for high-strength quotes that hit trending topics, it would close the loop faster, reducing copy-pasting. The third improvement relates to reporting, specifically custom insight dashboards. The tool displays which topics have the most highlights, but we cannot build custom dashboards yet. For example, showing all security quotes from healthcare companies with more than 1,000 employees over the last 90 days would enable better filtering, and exportable dashboards would streamline quarterly reviews.
The solution provides agnostic blockers for platforms as well as for containerization. Within that containerization, it offers generic blockers. However, my project might require it to provide Windows-specific blockers or Linux-specific blockers, as I often work with only one platform at a time. If I received categorization in containerization blockers, it would save time. Understanding only the OS-specific blockers means I would avoid resolving irrelevant issues, thus saving time. Initially, I receive a response from support, however, if there is involvement from R&D or other teams, it may take longer than expected. The support team is challenging when sharing source code. As this is a static code analysis tool, it sometimes requires source code for R&D. However, CAST clients may be restricted from sharing due to business logic and nondisclosure agreements. This creates a challenge, and I may have to share pseudo code or seek client approval, risking escalation.
Consultant/Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Oct 20, 2022
We get some code insights from CAST. We get insights as to if this or that function has way too many comments or things like that. We would like to backtrace, and understand how dependent that is as per the application. For example, when you are writing code in C Sharp versus writing code in C++, obviously, C++ has more complexities within that. What CAST does is CAST aggregates for different languages, and if they could provide us inputs for each of these languages separately, then that'd be great. When they classify code between their own code and third-party code, they classify it based on the number of files, and not really the number of lines. I'm not sure how extensive of a change this is on their end; however, it would be nice if they could tell us the number of lines of code that are not theirs. There's a bit of a learning curve at the outset. We have come across bugs occasionally. Technical support could be better.
Its price should be better. It is a pretty costly tool. They have two products: CAST Highlight and CAST AIP. Both are licensed separately. As per CAST, Highlight is for RAPID prototyping and AIP is for in depth detailed analysis. But then there are areas which Highlights covers (Cloud Adoption) which AIP does not. Our experience in using AIP is that it also does not look at entire tech stack and does not provide the list of all technologies present in your application and then flag what is supported and what is not so that customer has clear view. Highlight probably does that. They need to simplify it for customers. I would expect CAST Highlight to have lighter version of the Health dashboard and the Engineering dashboards . These dashboards are currently a part of CAST AIP, and if these are made available in CAST Highlight, customers won't have to use two different products all the time.
Advisor Solution Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Apr 23, 2020
The level of abstraction is a little bit high compared to other solutions, such as Veracode. The reports that describe the issues of concern are rather abstract and the issues should be more clearly described to the user. Reducing this type of technical debt would help to manage policy such that it was easier to create and submit for approval. Essentially, it does not provide enough help for the developers.
Portfolio-level insights for app modernization, AI readiness, tech debt, OSS risks
CAST Highlight is a SaaS software intelligence technology that delivers rapid, fact-based insights across your entire application portfolio. By automatically analyzing the source code of hundreds or thousands of applications, CAST Highlight helps organizations assess cloud maturity, AI & Agentic readiness, software health, open source risk, resiliency, technical debt, and sustainability from a single...
If I talk about improvements for CAST Highlight, I would suggest three things. The first is better understanding or niche understanding. Right now, the intent matching is strong for general topics such as ease of use, but for niche B2B terms such as HIPAA compliance or multi-tenant architecture, it sometimes misses context. Improving the domain-specific models would make highlights more accurate for these verticals. The second improvement is more control over the deduplication logic. CAST Highlight's deduplication is great for avoiding spam, but sometimes we want two similar quotes if they are from very different company sizes, such as SMB versus enterprise perspectives on pricing. A slider to adjust deduplication strictness would help. The third suggestion I would like to give is deeper sentiment and outcome tagging. While it has core sentiment capabilities, it does not tag outcomes automatically. For instance, if a quote mentions saved $50,000 per year, tagging that as cost savings $50,000 would let us build ROI charts instantly instead of reading each quote manually. Regarding user experience, integrations, and reporting, I think there is room to enhance those aspects. Regarding user experience, I would suggest improving user actions in terms of bulk actions and keyboard shortcuts. Day-to-day analysts review 50-plus suggested quotes, and currently it is mostly clicking to approve one by one. Adding bulk approve or reject options and keyboard shortcuts would significantly reduce the time taken. A small UX change can lead to a big speed boost. The second point is integrations when pushing to the CMS and Slack alerts. Right now, we export approved highlights manually from CAST Highlight. If CAST Highlight could push directly to our CMS or send Slack alerts for high-strength quotes that hit trending topics, it would close the loop faster, reducing copy-pasting. The third improvement relates to reporting, specifically custom insight dashboards. The tool displays which topics have the most highlights, but we cannot build custom dashboards yet. For example, showing all security quotes from healthcare companies with more than 1,000 employees over the last 90 days would enable better filtering, and exportable dashboards would streamline quarterly reviews.
The solution provides agnostic blockers for platforms as well as for containerization. Within that containerization, it offers generic blockers. However, my project might require it to provide Windows-specific blockers or Linux-specific blockers, as I often work with only one platform at a time. If I received categorization in containerization blockers, it would save time. Understanding only the OS-specific blockers means I would avoid resolving irrelevant issues, thus saving time. Initially, I receive a response from support, however, if there is involvement from R&D or other teams, it may take longer than expected. The support team is challenging when sharing source code. As this is a static code analysis tool, it sometimes requires source code for R&D. However, CAST clients may be restricted from sharing due to business logic and nondisclosure agreements. This creates a challenge, and I may have to share pseudo code or seek client approval, risking escalation.
There could be potential improvements or additional features added to CAST Highlight to make it better.
The ease of configuration and customization could be improved in CAST Highlight.
We get some code insights from CAST. We get insights as to if this or that function has way too many comments or things like that. We would like to backtrace, and understand how dependent that is as per the application. For example, when you are writing code in C Sharp versus writing code in C++, obviously, C++ has more complexities within that. What CAST does is CAST aggregates for different languages, and if they could provide us inputs for each of these languages separately, then that'd be great. When they classify code between their own code and third-party code, they classify it based on the number of files, and not really the number of lines. I'm not sure how extensive of a change this is on their end; however, it would be nice if they could tell us the number of lines of code that are not theirs. There's a bit of a learning curve at the outset. We have come across bugs occasionally. Technical support could be better.
CAST Highlight could improve to allow us to comment and do a deep analysis by ourselves.
Its price should be better. It is a pretty costly tool. They have two products: CAST Highlight and CAST AIP. Both are licensed separately. As per CAST, Highlight is for RAPID prototyping and AIP is for in depth detailed analysis. But then there are areas which Highlights covers (Cloud Adoption) which AIP does not. Our experience in using AIP is that it also does not look at entire tech stack and does not provide the list of all technologies present in your application and then flag what is supported and what is not so that customer has clear view. Highlight probably does that. They need to simplify it for customers. I would expect CAST Highlight to have lighter version of the Health dashboard and the Engineering dashboards . These dashboards are currently a part of CAST AIP, and if these are made available in CAST Highlight, customers won't have to use two different products all the time.
The level of abstraction is a little bit high compared to other solutions, such as Veracode. The reports that describe the issues of concern are rather abstract and the issues should be more clearly described to the user. Reducing this type of technical debt would help to manage policy such that it was easier to create and submit for approval. Essentially, it does not provide enough help for the developers.