When you have more than one custom software project running at the same time, how can you tell which ones are working well, and which ones need help to get them back on track? At the same time, how can you offset the impact of poor-quality code against delayed product updates or postponed releases? What’s needed is an early-warning risk management system, and one way to do that is to assess and continuously monitor software quality.
Balancing development speed with code quality
Rushing to get new software features and functionality live, without addressing, or even measuring code quality, is a dangerous game. If a defective product goes to market, you could end up losing customers or, worse still, end up with a PR disaster on your hands.
Whether your development team follows waterfall or agile development principles, source code analysis provides factual, actionable insights that help you optimize business operations. That’s especially useful when you’re managing multiple software projects, running different technologies, and depending on the efforts of a range of external vendors.
Independent fact-based insights into code quality give both technical and non-technical people the same thing: certainty. For technical teams, it enables them to validate the quality of their code in a way that management can understand. For business leaders, source code analysis helps uncover hidden organizational issues.
Surfacing organizational issues and addressing them
Low-quality custom code is an ongoing threat to business continuity. Yet, for non-technical leaders, it’s very hard to get meaningful oversight over code quality. Low-quality and unstable code has various causes. Sometimes developers simply don’t understand what they’ve been asked to build.
It can be a fundamental organizational problem to transfer the plans for what should be built from the architects to the engineers. The data provided by source code analysis enables you to trace faults back to the source, giving you full transparency over software development.
For instance, we recently heard of a case where a third-party development team would add the features or functionality requested, only to be told to scrap them because it wasn’t what the client wanted. Source code analysis revealed a cycle of creation and deletion over an extended period of time. But the development partner wasn’t at fault. It was an internal issue around communication and the setting of project requirements.
Optimizing ongoing operations
By leveraging source code analysis in the right way, you can add value to your business operations. Regardless of whether you apply waterfall or agile principles to development, source code analysis tools can reveal valuable insights into productivity and code quality, and help you more accurately estimate project timelines based on known variables such as project size and complexity. The other advantage is that learning from one project can be applied to the next one, and so on, in a cycle of continuous improvement and development.
BonCode’s consultancy-driven solutions for assessing and monitoring source code quality are designed to add value to your business operations. To discover how, book a demo or chat to one of our quality experts today. Contact us
