Five Questions With: William McCaffrey

WILLIAM MCCAFFREY is co-founder and chief operating officer of Vector Software in East Greenwich. / COURTESY VECTOR SOFTWARE
WILLIAM MCCAFFREY is co-founder and chief operating officer of Vector Software in East Greenwich. / COURTESY VECTOR SOFTWARE

William McCaffrey, co-founder and chief operating officer of Vector Software in East Greenwich, talks about his company, and the industries that it serves. Vector Software employs 90 globally, and also has its Europe, Middle East & Africa headquarters in London, and Asia headquarters in Yokohama, Japan.
PBN: Tell me how long Vector Software has been in business and how it got started.
MCCAFFREY:
Vector Software was founded in 1990. Myself and John Paliotta started the company doing consulting development work for military applications. During one of our engagements we had the idea to automate the software testing process that everyone was doing manually. In 1993 we began developing the initial VectorCAST dynamic testing product – which still reigns as our flagship product today.
PBN: What sort of industries do you serve?
MCCAFFREY:
Our first clients were in the avionics industry, one of the most complex computing environments in the world. From there, we branched out into defense, automotive, industrial controls, medical device and railway – all highly regulated industries with software testing standards and requirements in place that needed to be met. Now, there are many other business-critical sectors coming into play that have a mandate from their users, rather than the government, to ensure that their embedded software systems are operating with the highest quality and without disruption. Any downtime, system crashes or data loss can result in a loss of revenue, customers, brand value – or even financial disaster. With more than 25 years of expertise gained from working with the world’s leading brands, in the most challenging software development environments, we are now the partner of choice for any organization looking to take software quality seriously.
PBN: Can you explain how the VectorCAST® test automation platform works?
MCCAFFREY:
In an interconnected, software-driven world, every company has a growing asset (or liability) – its code. Vector Software enables companies to take control and dramatically improve software quality, even in the most complex embedded software environments.
The VectorCAST platform provides automated software testing tools that quickly allow users to check their code health in real time by enabling the implementation of a complete and automated test infrastructure across the software development lifecycle. While embedded software testing has typically been a tedious process, the VectorCAST solution supports C, C++ and Ada and uses Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration and Change-Based Testing processes to engineer reliable software for accelerated time-to-market release cycles. In-depth analytics are provided via heat maps and dynamic dashboards to provide code quality and completeness metrics, enabling users to prioritize valuable test resources.
The benefits provided by VectorCAST include huge savings in terms of after-market services, reduced total cost of ownership, improved schedules and overall development resources.
PBN: How is the industry changing/can you talk about any trends?
MCCAFFREY:
America’s “crumbling infrastructure” has traditionally referred to rundown roads, aging bridges and electricity grids that are struggling to keep up with increasing demand. However, our world is faced with an equally pressing infrastructure challenge – the crumbling digital infrastructure. The products we’ve come to rely on in our everyday lives, from kitchen appliances to cars, are increasingly being controlled by software. A lot of that software is built on legacy code, which carries a tremendous amount of technical debt, underlying core problems with large volumes of code, and associated risk. As we’ve seen recently, this has been the cause of major auto recalls and product failures. As our world becomes even more interconnected via technology evolutions such as the Internet of Things, the digital infrastructure becomes increasingly critical as safety becomes an issue with the malfunction of IoT-enabled products such as smart cars, medical devices and home security systems. Cybersecurity attacks that can be executed by exploiting vulnerabilities in software code are also a rapidly emerging and very serious threat as evidenced by last month’s massive distributed Denial-of-Service attack on Dyn, which used a botnet of thousands of Internet of Things devices to disrupt major websites, including CNN.com, The New York Times, PayPal, Spotify and Twitter.
Vector Software is at the very center of all of these current trends. Our VectorCAST test automation platform is able to interrogate an application’s software code and identify possible weaknesses – in turn, exposing defects in a company’s code to show where in the code there is risk. From there, we are able to provide customers with the right set of tools needed to address code issues and improve software quality.
PBN: Do you have any expansion plans for RI?
MCCAFFREY:
We recently announced the hire of Jeffrey Fortin as head of product management. Jeffrey is local to Portsmouth, and is key to the growth of our company both in Rhode Island and in the overall economy. He will be instrumental in positioning and expanding the VectorCAST test automation solutions in our key and emerging markets worldwide. Our team also continues to grow in R.I. in all areas of the company, including engineering, sales and marketing.

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